Abstract

Plainly Visible: The Making of Visual Economic Data in Buenos Aires and São Paulo, 1900-1930

This paper examines the emergence of a global knowledge regime grounded upon the production and diffusion of visual economic data in the early twentieth century. By looking at the adoption of strategies of data visualization (including graphs, diagrams, tables, and pictograms) in Buenos Aires and São Paulo to represent facets of economic life connected with their integration into international markets, this paper analyzes the political economy of knowledge production which helped accord numbers, indicators, and their visual representations a privileged status as a technology of distance amidst the challenges of an increasingly interconnected world economy. Plainly Visible examines how data visualization techniques and strategies promoted global convergences on narratives of economic governance by looking at how visual representations helped tell stories to global audiences about national economic growth, development, and the measurement of national economies. Because they could represent dimensions of economic life at the local, regional, national and/or international levels, data visualization strategies helped produce, connect, and make economic processes visible and legible to a global audience of non-exerts; thus, Plainly Visible explores the origins of our purportedly reliance on data visualization as (im)partial mediators of global economic knowledge by examining the basis for the growing confidence on graphs, diagrams, tables, and pictograms as faithful representations of economic life. The paper also examines the strategies employed to promote visual literacy, including the training of experts to employ a global language of economic visualization. Finally, the paper discusses how we can use visual representations to construct historical narratives of global knowledge production and economic life by exploring processes of innovation, adaptation, and diffusion outside knowledge centers.