Joachim Krausse
         Information at a glance.
         On the history of the diagram

         For Michael Burke


Writing is symbols tracing history: its letters reduce events to the symbolic representation of the spoken word. Writing stores series of actions, processes.
The hitch: only events that manifest themselves in this continuous form are worthy of being written down.

Jo Krausse reconstructs a different story. In contrast with merely marking the passage of time, Krausse tells a story of representations designed to illustrate in-visible conditions. There is no model for these representations, they do not mirror what has gone before. Their forms are based on the intellectual processing of symbolic material: mainly numbers which represent realities and have been theoretically formalised. Two tendencies intersect in today’s information graphics: cartography and attempts to express coordinated and tabular proportions.


      I
Usually, the diagram is a chart, graph, drawing or figure produced by graphic means and which serves to explain and communicate the facts of a particular case. As such, it supplements the technologies of the culture of writing and calculating and thus is an integral element in the repertoire of practices with which information is ordered and prepared in order to transmit and process it as economically as possible. It is in this property of informational economy that lies value of diagrams for almost all the disciplines as well as the publishing media.
In contrast to works of fine art — paintings, for example, or artist‘s prints — diagrams have no standing of their own; they belong to that class of artefacts for which legends or keys or expository texts are essential, and they always refer to a presupposed or accompanying text.
We thus encounter diagrams in daily life as added visualisations of texts, as illustrations to lectures, but also as an indispensable form of processing data produced by means of counting and measuring instruments in medicine, technology, the social sciences and the hard sciences. Here, the provision of diagrams appears to be only a late stage in the complicated multi-step procedures that serve to translate findings into concise statements or evaluations. It is striking that the Greek word ’diagram‘ has the same prefix and is formed in the same way as the word ’diagnosis‘, and in fact in medicine we see particularly clearly to what extent diagnosis is dependent on diagrams, from the temperature chart to magnetic resonance tomography. In many cases the findings can only be interpreted when the raw data has been organized into the form of diagrams.
One is therefore obliged to contradict to common assumption, according to which diagrams are only accessories — simply derivatory, secondary forms of something that has somehow, somewhere already been effectively formulated.
No argument for a reduction in status can be deducted from the statement that diagrams are simply transcriptions; after all, the introduction and use of Arabic numerals were also ’only‘ a new method of transcription, which we nonetheless have to thank for algebra. One cannot ignore the fact that visualisation has traditionally been treated by the sciences as secondary; although in theory, its status was that of an auxiliary aid or messengers, in case of need, it was indispensable.
This becomes comprehensible only when one takes into account the history of science and the slowly changing relations between fine arts and the applied arts. In this history we find certain hierarchies perpetuated in the form of articulations of knowledge that privilege the written text over sets of figures, and the latter over visualisations, diagrams, maps and models. One consequence of this tradition has been the notable lack of a science of visualisation, of diagrams in general. There are large gaps to be closed here, that still exist between a general theory of signs, semiotics or semiology and special fields such as iconography or cartography, in spite of individual efforts. The science of visualisation or of diagrams in general would have to cover diagrams, maps and models, so that the treatment of symbols and transcriptions which comprise designing and planning could be brought into relation with the very different treatment of symbols and transcriptions by the sciences in order to produce evidence or manifestness without reflecting on its share in the production of knowledge.
Why is it only cartography that achieved the status of an autonomous and highly esteemed discipline? It was undoubtedly due to the wholly practical requirements of navigation, logistics, conquest and colonisation’s and the construction and building activities which went with them that cartography acquired such a privileged position as an art and a science at the same Time. However, its special status only became privileged because every political, military and economical operation was crucially dependent on the extent of the control that could be exercised over little-known territories, foreign countries and bodies of water, and because these opportunities for control were secured first and foremost by a visual transcript which translated the characteristics that could be observed — in accordance with a code of rules — into readable graphic elements that could be used in the medium of the map, independent of the person and locality. In the dissolution of the link between location and person and at the same time, the securing of the complex of unique characteristics of the object ’territory‘ through fixing it graphically and reproducing it by printing, a double aspect of mobilisation appears, that of the traveller being able to take with him the characteristics of a place and, once removed, having at disposal future journeys, investments or military operations, all of them rendered possible by the map. In numerous individual studies in media history, this mobilisation effect proper to modern media has been brought into relation with the emergence and spread of power. Bruno Latour gives a résumé: »How can distant or foreign places and times be gathered in one place in a form that allows all the places and times to be presented at once, and which allows orders to move back to where they came from? Talking of power is an endless and mystical task; talking of distance, gathering, fidelity, summing up, transmission, etc., is an empirical one ... Instead of using large-scale entities to explain science and technology as most sociologists of science do, we should start from the inscriptions and their mobilisation and see how they help small entities to become large ones.«(1) The great men of history turn out to be little men with good maps.


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