John Theibault Critical Thinking

This week’s readings focused on the use of visual and graphical expressions to convey all or part of one’s historical argument. John Theibault makes two salient observations about visualizations. First, how the author presents the graphic can shape the reader’s perception of the argument in either intended of unintended ways. For example, a map that illustrates election results by county of any recent presidential election gives the perception of a Republican Party landslide. A Cartogram or Choropleth man skews the geography to illustrate population centers and thus illustrates a close election result. Also, I find when you create an illustration that deviates from the reader’s normal experience, for example a map that only slightly resembles your expectation, it causes them to stop and consider the argument more then a regular “pretty map.” Second, a graphic can illustrate something more than its x
However, I did pause at a passage regarding “the dangers of the visualization scheme…can quickly get one lost in the thicket of concepts.” While it is true
While her arguments and observations are salient, she gets so mired down in jargon (in fact, I believe she invents a new word “capta,” or at least revives it from some archaic use. It took about five pages of a Google search of “definition capta” to get past Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to finally find some explanation). Despite that, her argument that historians need to be mindful that information presented graphically does not, nor should it, fit nicely into an x and y graphic. The information we seek to express is always more nuanced and complex and the ways we choose to graphically represent it needs to take that under