_{This is the first in a series of posts emerging from the many notes I’ve taken in the past few years for a future book, tentatively titled Principled Design: An Ethics of Information Graphics. I’ll use these posts to play with some ideas, but please don’t assume I’ll use any of the following in the book itself.}

Dear friends, Alberto here. Let me tell you about a series of serendipitous insights.

I’ve spent the last few days working on the Visualising Climate conference (Bologna, November 4-6), sending emails to everyone who submitted a proposal for a talk or a workshop. We’ve received nearly 300 submissions, so we had to be selective; we’ll have tons of great speakers. The conference schedule will be up at the end of July or early August, but you can already see our three keynotes, Angela Morelli, Federica Fragapane, and John Keefe. The conference is sold out, although we might reopen registration briefly in mid-July, if we can manage to make some extra space.

Anyway, in one of the pauses I made, I visited the latest project by one of the Visualising Climate co-organizers, MBG-CSIC’s Dominic Royé, who is a climate scientist, an R expert, and an excellent designer. It’s a Shiny application that compares the daily mean temperature in Spain against its normal (1961-1990). Dominic has written an excellent article about this project; check it out.

During another pause (I’m skilled at giving myself persuasive excuses to step away from repetitive work) I read an essay by philosopher and poet Jan Zwicky titled ”Auden as Philosopher: How Poets Think” from her collection Once Upon a Time in the West.

Something clicked in my brain. For a couple of hours I couldn’t focus on work, for Zwicky clarified thoughts I had while navigating Dominic’s charts.

Zwicky’s essay is inspired by W.H. Auden’s lecture "Making, Knowing, and Judging", a meditation on the nature of poetry. To Auden, poetry begins with an encounter with the sacred, which isn’t the supernatural, but any intuited reality that overwhelms us because it brims with meaning.

This might sound a bit mystical —and it is, in the most accurate and beautiful sense of that word. It’s also a rather common occurrence: Think of the intense feelings that arise when contemplating a majestic landscape, meeting an admirable and inspiring person, being overtaken by an intellectual epiphany, witnessing or experiencing great suffering or loss, or falling in love. These are all manifestations of the sacred.

The experience of the sacred is pre-verbal: When you face the sacred, you know you’re in the presence of a deep truth, but this knowing isn’t explainable to yourself or to others, at least at first. Experiencing the sacred depends on what Auden, following Coleridge, calls “primary imagination”, a contemplative and passive “passion of awe” which can be at times joyous, majestic, or terrifying, depending on the nature of the sacred presenting itself to us.

(Imagination in Auden’s lecture doesn’t have the common meaning of “making things up”. Imagination to Auden and to Zwicky is a mode of perception.)

Zwicky says that “the passive awe of the primary Imagination precipitates a desire to express that awe” through the secondary Imagination. This is the active, conscious, and directed attempt to find “a fitting or appropriate expression of the primary imagination’s awe.” The work of art emerges from this process of translating the contemplative perceptions of the primary imagination into words, images, sounds, and the like, through the secondary imagination.

This is also what happens sometimes in the design process. More about that below.

Zwicky is part of a philosophical genealogy —not a school, as it doesn’t have doctrinal coherence— that she calls lyric philosophy; she’s written a book with the same title. This genealogy has illustrious thinkers in its ranks, such as Heraclitus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, or María Zambrano, whose “razón poética” (poetic reason) I’ve mentioned in recent keynotes. I doubt Zwicky has read Zambrano, as almost none of her writings have been translated to English, but the similarity between the two is striking.

Poetry and philosophy have been inseparable beginning with the Pre-Socratics (the sole known work of Parmenides is in verse), through Plato (whose dialogues, particularly the earlier ones, are poetic and dramatic marvels), and all the way to Nietzsche and beyond. However, thinkers such as Zwicky or Zambrano propose that the link between the lyric and the philosophical isn’t just stylistic, but epistemological: the lyric is a way of knowing.

In fact, Zwicky compares what she calls ”Auden’s poetic epistemology“ to its opposite, the “epistemology of Baconian science” —named after Francis Bacon— a crude version of true science. To poetic epistemology, reality out there is worthy of contemplation, veneration, and gratitude. To Baconian epistemology, reality exists to be judged, controlled, and exploited.

Zwicky’s essay reminded me of the three books written by Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (co-authored), Data by Design (Lauren alone), and Counting Feminicide (Catherine alone). They are deep critiques of the “Baconian” roots of modern data science and data visualization; statistics and modern chart-making have been intrinsically tied to imperialism, colonialism, and eugenics. We shouldn’t ignore the dark history of our craft.

(Just a quick reminder that Lauren and Catherine have created an entire course for the Open Visualization Academy, Data Feminism for Data Visualization).

Modern visualization is a child of a “Baconian” view of science and statistics, as other authors have chronicled: Kim Marriott in his comprehensive The Golden Age of Data Visualization, and Michael Friendly & Howard Wainer in A History of Data Visualization.

However, that doesn’t mean that data graphics must always be prosaic: conventional, pragmatic, instrumental. Charts can be lyrical, in a Zwickyesque sense, in a similar way that a work of art is lyrical: their creation can begin with an experience of awe (primary imagination) and continue with a desire to find a proper expression to inspire that awe in others (secondary imagination).

Take Charles Joseph Minard’s famous map of Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812:

We don’t have a record of Minard’s thinking process when designing this piece, but I can’t fail to wonder if he felt overwhelmed by the colossal scale of the human tragedy that unfolded in the Russian front: the tens of thousands of soldiers who perished; the slow and dangerous march towards Moscow; the humiliating retreat; and the cold, the unfathomable cold.

Moreover, I find Minard’s chart evocative not only of what is being shown, but of what is absent: the number of anonymous Russian soldiers and civilians who also died in this massive disaster. Minard’s chart began with an experience of the sacred —a sad and dreadful one— which he expressed in a unique and persuasive masterpiece.

I could write something similar about Florence Nightingale’s famous charts of mortality in hospitals during the Crimean War. According to historians, Nightingale’s famous statistical and graphical work after the war was, in no small part, the result of the horror (the awe, the sacred) she experienced in the war, and even more in its aftermath, when she realized that many soldiers would have survived had the sanitary conditions in hospitals been better.

Hugh Small, a Nightingale biographer, has called some of her charts visual poems. So are Dominic’s charts.

Zwicky's essay named an intuition I’ve had for a while, related to the jolt certain data charts give us, the ones that get stuck in our memories because they leave us shaken and awestruck. This jolt is an echo of an encounter with the sacred that the designer experiences, and manages to pass on.

There’s immense warmth in the sober elegance of Dominic’s charts. It’s the life-threatening heat so many people around the world are suffering these days, reality’s inevitable backlash to our societal hubris and carelessness.

These are charts that don’t need to be hyperbolic, to scream. Like in a haiku, quiet stylistic restraint and strict faithfulness to compositional conventions make these graphics evoke a menacing present and an even worse future.

Thanks to Zwicky I discovered that Robert Bringhurst, author of the magisterial The Elements of Typographic Style, one of my favorite design books, has also written extensively about the lyric. Here’s Bringhurst in his Everywhere Being Is Dancing, a book of lectures and essays that I’ve rushed to purchase:

Bringhurst's "being" is equivalent to Auden's and Zwicky’s "sacred”: any reality we encounter and perceive as imbued with overwhelming meaning.

Bringhurst is a clear example of a designer-poet, but we can all be poets in our own ways —a nurse turned statistician seeking to persuade British authorities to improve the sanitary conditions of soldiers; a cartographer striving to illuminate the horrors of war; a climate scientist designing an R/Shiny application. What they all share is a willingness to feel and reflect on the weight of awe-inspiring realities they face, and then surrender to the need —perhaps to the obligation— to communicate them to others.

Great charts aren’t mere representations of data, but tributes to the sacred.

I leave you with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Moving On’, from his posthumous album Thanks for the Dance. Few writers I know are such perfect embodiments of Auden’s and Zwicky’s ideas about the sacred and the lyric. To Cohen, poetry and song were paths to the divine. “As for the world, the job, the war, I ditched them all to love you more”, he sang into the microphone, sitting on an orthopedic chair in his living room during the last days of a long and meaningful life: