Sensing place: data representation in early America

Abstract

This dissertation examines the strategies used by early Americans to collect and display data on a variety of natural phenomena. I argue that these data displays allowed Americans to enter debates and dialogues about what kind of place the North American continent was and would be. Each chapter focuses on a specific data type (trees, birds, rivers) and considers the scale of place that such data was used to imagine (local, national, imperial). Importantly, the data practices in this dissertation overlapped and competed with one another, illustrating the subjectivity of data. I make this case through a series of close readings and data visualizations.