Alison Hedley has a PhD in Communication and Culture and holds a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University. Her current research addresses the history of data visualization in popular journalism, focusing especially on Victorian and Edwardian Britain. She is editor of the Yellow Nineties Personography, a biographical database about authors and artists of the 1890s, and author of the forthcoming book Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885-1918 (University of Toronto Press).

Episode Description

Data visualization is a skill that's becoming increasingly important. In feels as wide-ranging as Education, Medicine and Journalism. It's also something that can seem incredibly complicated and imitating. The Fear Factor around creating visualization can obscure the long history of their use. People like W.E.B. DuBois and Florence Nightingale created data visualizations that don't different from what we might see today. The arguments made by such visualisations is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories with guest Alison Hedley.