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Ideally, data visualization techniques can facilitate discovery of trends within data sets, exposing previously unnoticed interconnections among and between data points, or otherwise confirm or dispute assumptions, which in turn can fuel further inquiry. But data visualization techniques, in the broadest sense, are also used for more message-driven or even outright propagandistic purposes. In many cases, the two modes of analysis — open-ended inquiry, on the one hand, and message-driven campaigns, on the other — quickly become intertwined in practice.
Below are some examples from the library’s “Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition” digital collection (a subset of the Chester H. Kirk Collection on Alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous). As noted in the digital collection’s accompanying online essay by Leah Rae Berk, the graphs, while visually convincing, are usually designed to suit exaggerated or predetermined causal claims, or else present only fragmented analyses, to stress the (no doubt oftentimes significant) influence of alcohol, above all else:
…A number of Temperance and Prohibition Era posters, like a number of the religious pamphlets, used a logos format to make a pathos appeal. These posters contained graphs and statistical information, presenting moral claims as factual information, such as “Alcoholism and Degeneracy,” “Intemperance as a Cause of Poverty Greatly Reduced Since Prohibition” and “Drink, A Great Cause of Immorality.” The poster “Drink, A Great Cause of Immorality” showed the results of a study of 865 Immoral Inebriate Women, claiming that 40% of their immorality was due solely to drink, including as evidence a statement by a medical expert: “There is no apparent reason why any of the persons…should have become immoral but for preceding alcoholism.” “Intemperance as a Cause of Poverty Greatly Reduced Since Prohibition” presented a graph that tracked the drop in poverty as a result of increased temperance, therefore conflating intemperance and immoral behavior with greater social ills like poverty….
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“Drink Impaired Scholarship”
