The handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations

I spent last week at Harvard doing research in the archives of William James, the psychologist, philosopher, psychical researcher, brother of Henry James, and all around interesting person. He was a brilliant, charming, self-defeating, deeply strange man (exhibit A: he believed taking a high dose of nitrous oxide helped him finally understand Hegel). That mixture of qualities comes across vividly in his papers. What doesn’t, at least at first, is that he was a talented visual artist. In fact, before he became a psychologist, William James dreamed of being a professional painter. He studied for several years in his late teens and early twenties under the painter William Morris Hunt. John la Farge’s portrait of a young William James at the easel, when they were both art students, circa 1859. Although none of William’s paintings appear to survive, a careful reader of his archive will find evidence that he continued to draw throughout his life. Here he is, for instance, doodling on an envelope addressed to him from Geneva: Doodles on a letter to James from 1898, photographed by me at the Houghton Library, Harvard.Readers of The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand’s wonderful book about James and his circle, will recognize the image below as William’s sensitive drawing of his brother Wilkie while he was recovering from being shot during the Civil War. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard.The visual creativity of James is not just a clue about how his own mind worked. It’s also part of a larger shift in the culture of science during his generation: in the nineteenth century, design and the nascent world of big data came together, for the first time, to create the modern concept of data visualization. Although James and his collaborators are rarely mentioned in discussions of the origins of data visualization, they actually played a very important role in shaping it. They were the consolidators and extenders of a new paradigm — the generation after the famous names in the field like William Playfair and Florence Nightingale.“Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East” by Florence Nightingale, 1858 via Wikimedia CommonsThe generation of William James came into adulthood in the Machine Age of the 1870s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Information buffeted the human brain like never before.

And the new technique of data visualization pushed into new domains: the mapping of the mind, the sociology of race, and the pursuit of explicit political ends. James is famous among historians of science for what Francesca Bordogna calls “boundary work” — he moves across disciplines and fields with a manic, restless energy that makes it hard to figure out exactly what he was. As we’ll see, this included an unusual approach to visualizing mental activity that yielded significant firsts, including the first schematic of a neural network. Along the way, James also had important relationships with two pioneers of modern data visualization who are rarely put in the same sentence: Francis Galton and W.E.B. du Bois. James, Galton, and du Bois: products of the Machine Age.Francis Galton (center) was a sort of intellectual frenemy for James, initially a mentor and influence, then later — in his guise as a founder of eugenics and ardent imperialist — as an exemplar of the dangers of scientific hubris. Du Bois (pictured at right) studied with James at Harvard and was deeply influenced by his philosophy of pluralism.What they shared is a conviction that drawing, diagramming, and composing images was not a decorative step added after the thinking was done. It was how the thinking got done. This seems to me a crucial point in light of new AI tools like Claude Design, which automates the design process (on which more below). Quite a few people have pointed out that writing is a form of thought (my favorite entry in this genre is this 2025 essay by Derek Thompson). But it’s worth thinking more about what else counts as thinking too — specifically, the sorts of important, creative thinking we don’t want to accidentally mislabel as “drudgery that we are happy to let AI take over for us.” Design, I would argue, is not drudgery. The images below also remind us how handmade data visualization once was. W.E.B. du Bois’s visualizations from the 1900 World’s Fair are rightfully famous online, and they look great as compressed jpgs shared on social media. But it’s important to remember that these are large, hand-drawn, hand-lettered posters. These are not just the product of mental work but manual work, too.

That link between the hand and mind is harder to come by in a world where all research is digital, but it can be fun and important to access when doing serious research. When I was deepest in researching the history of 20th century psychedelic science for Tripping on Utopia, I filled up a yellow notebook with collaged images and primary source snippets from my archival research. I started it as a sideline, almost a hobby to distract me from what I saw as the “real” work of actually writing the book. It turned out to be one of the most significant forms of research I did, precisely because it was so freeform and undirected. I started noticing links between different documents, and thinking more deeply about the motives (public, private, and even subconscious) of the people I was writing about. Entries for the Congresswoman and LSD enthusiast Clare Boothe Luce (left) and the occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons (right) in my yellow legal pads.The rest of this post is a gallery of some of the ways that James, Galton, and Du Bois visualized data along with some desultory commentary. I end by experimenting a bit with Claude Design to see what gets lost when we automate this type of exploratory visual thinking with data. If you find it interesting, please consider subscribing.ShareYou’d be hard-pressed to find any reference to James in books about the history of data visualizations or design. But I think he deserves a page or two. For one thing, his Principles of Psychology (1890) contains what I believe to be the earliest ever visual representation of a neural network:WJ’s diagram in Principles of Psychology (1890, p. 570) showing how one memory (left), on “reoccurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other” (right).The most interesting data visualization in James’s work is this however, IMO:Visualization of the stream of consciousness from chapter 9 of James’ Principles of Psychology (1890). James intends the image above as a representation of how consciousness “moves through” the process of uttering of a simple sentence over time. The numbers on one axis are showing moments in time, and the other axis shows the words being said or thought. The Joy Division-esque crest running through the middle is the changing attention we pay to each word over time.

It is really striking to me how much this looks like a computer rendering — but it’s from 1890! For this attempt at a sort of faux-four-dimensional modeling of thought, plus the neural network chart alone, I think James deserves a lot of credit for his data visualization. There are other interesting images in Principles of Psychology, especially in chapter two which you can read here, although they are a bit more familiar. For instance, here is a schematic of how a child perceives a candle flame:“Let the current 1—1, from the eye, discharge upward as well as downward when it reaches the lower centre for vision, and arouse the perceptional process s1 in the hemispheres… Let the feeling of the arm’s extension also send up a current which leaves a trace of itself, m1; let the burnt finger leave an analogous trace, s2; and let the movement of retraction leave m2. These four processes will now, by virtue of assumption 2, be associated together by the path s1—m1—s2—m2, running from the first to the last.”And an early attempt to map which parts of the brain correspond to specific body regions and sensations:The brain of the monkey. Fig. 6.—Left Hemisphere of Monkey's Brain. Outer Surface. From the first edition of The Principles of Psychology by William James (1890), vol. I, page 34.James read Galton closely, and cited him throughout Principles of Psychology — especially on questions of mental imagery and visual perception. Galton’s famous “breakfast-table questionnaire,” which asked hundreds of correspondents to describe how vividly they could picture the objects on their breakfast table that morning, was one of the first systematic attempts to gather data on subjective visual experience at scale. James was fascinated by it. He replicated versions of Galton’s mental-imagery surveys in his own classes and used the results in his writing.

Galton was also a pioneer of meteorology and produced many, many beautiful charts relating to weather phenomena — things like this:But the visualization that appears to have most interested James (and which I find most striking too) is this jam-packed color plate about mental imagery and synesthesia which comes at the end of Galton’s book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883):The big idea that linked Galton and James was not just that inner life could be represented as data, but that this data could be rendered as pictures.Galton, obsessed as he was by measurement and averages, took this in a novel and discomfiting direction. Elsewhere in the same book that the beautifully strange image above comes from, Galton introduced composite portraits — photographs of criminals, tubercular patients, “types” of any kind — layered individual faces on top of each other to produce a kind of statistical average in visual form. The project was inseparable from his invention of eugenics — a term which Galton coined in the same 1883 book. Galton’s visualizations encoded his conviction that human variation could be sorted, ranked, and ultimately improved through selective breeding. Detail from p.7 of Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883)In this work, to a large extent, the visual was the argument. Later, Galton even used his own photographs and biometric measurements as an example to encourage others to submit to biometric data collection. He wanted to visually model not just a new approach to data but a new mode of life in which all aspects of the human were reducible to data. Reading his work from the perspective of the 2020s — with our turn toward “post-literate,” image and video based apps powered by mass data collection — it’s hard not to conclude that in this, he was hugely successful. ShareWilliam James, who prized pluralism and unconventionality, could not follow Galton on his journey into the world of averages and biometric data. But one of James’s most talented students, a young W.E.B. Du Bois, did. Sort of. As the philosopher Colin Koopman writes, Du Bois took Galton’s obsession with measurement and flipped it on its head.