Form and Fact: Graphic Design, Modernity and Governance

What happens when form and governance are thought as part of the same system? This book attributes a particular function to the graphical arrangement of numerical and statistical data. This graphical convention, which displays facts, became a means through which to collect, classify, enumerate, and disseminate knowledge in the modern world. This book examines the presence and use of graphical conventions in a diversity of forms of knowledge, such as medicine, economics, moral statistics, public heath, and poverty. By showing how disparate issues ?causes of death, railway timetables, commercial fluctuations, crime and instruction, poverty, and health? are organised under the same graphical convention it will be possible to grasp the extent to which the modern subject has become an obedient user of these forms.