The Dot: Statistics, Society, and Graphic Design, c. 1830–1970

Abstract

Abstract This article takes Chermayeff & Geismar Associates’ cover designs for a paperback reprint series, “Studies in American Negro Life” (1968–c. 1972), as a starting point for investigating the history of the dot as a tool for social-statistical visualization. It first situates the series—which re-issued texts on Black history, sociology, and literature—within the context of 1960s urban unrest in the United States and shows how the arrangements of dots on each cover relate to contemporaneous experiments in urban cartography. It then traces a longer genealogy, considering the dot in relation to the 19th-century emergence of “society” and “the social” as novel epistemic concepts that came to serve as the primary objects of study for the modern social sciences in the 20th century. I address the integral role of statistics in this history, demonstrating how the logic of aggregation that undergirds statistical thinking has been habitually visualized through the dot. The article concludes by returning to the book series, addressing some of the individual covers and arguing that by evoking the visual vocabulary of the social sciences, the cover designs frame the series as a social scientific project overall.