Feeling Scale Is Necessary to Inspire Action
Visualization can transcend the limited grammar of numbers
Imagine being an abolitionist in 18th century England and encountering data of this type:
Traders knew that many of the Africans would die on the voyage and would therefore pack as many people as possible on to their ships — in total there were 609 enslaved men, women and children on board this ship. […] Each person occupied […] spaces just 10 inches high and were often chained or shackled together in pairs, making movement even more difficult.
If your goal was to persuade others to reject and publicly condemn slavery, consider the effectiveness of these two examples in influencing 18th-century audiences:
This poster representing the appalling conditions in which enslaved people were transported towards the Americas on the Middle Passage became the most widely reproduced image of the anti-slavery movement. The key element of the figure is the relatedness between the number of humans transported and the available space. Those are connected by the packed representation of 609 human beings in the hold of a slave ship. Using human-shaped symbols and high situatedness (the marks are on a familiar space) this piece makes you feel uncomfortable to your guts in a way numbers never could.
