Inventing Uncertainty in 18th-Century Infographics

Joseph Priestley’s 1765 Chart of Biography, a classic in the history of information graphics, was novel in many ways. Not least among these was the system of dots and lines it employed to represent uncertainty in graphic form. This paper examines the conceptual and formal aspects of uncertainty in Priestley’s chart. It explores how the Chart of Biography translated verbal information into graphic form, the limitations of that translation, and the new possibilities it opened up. It asks how Priestley’s system drew upon and contributed to approaches to uncertainty across domains ranging from epistemology and mathematics to punctuation and scientific illustration. And it explores uncertainties in the material history of Priestley’s chart itself.