As part of a team of researchers working with Dr. Lauren Klein I’m working to complete a digital recreation of nineteenth century author and educator, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s pioneering historical data visualizations that we’re calling the Floorchart. Chronicled in detail
by Klein’s project The Shape of History the original charts on which our design is based were created in 1856 by Peabody as a teaching tool and accompaniment to her history textbook A Chronological History of the United States, which allowed students to create their own hand-drawn interpretations of historical events in the form of grid-like visualizations. In Klein’s scholarship she highlights Peabody as an unsung figure of early data visualization whose work with these historical charts invited a different kind of engagement between students and historical knowledge. While Peabody’s work is rarely mentioned in accounts 
of the history of data visualizations, Klein argues that its deliberately abstract and geometric style of representation, “replaces the hierarchical mode of knowledge transmission that standard visualization techniques rest upon with a more horizontal mode, one that locates the source of knowledge in the interplay between viewer, image, and text.” 
Our digital recreation of Peabody’s concept takes the form of a textile interface illuminated by 900 individually addressable RGB LEDs in a graph structure, reminiscent of the original charts. Layered under the LEDs, a scaled up copper tape matrix keyboard receives user input to control the visual display. Still in testing phases, the finalized interface is anticipated to be completed in Spring of 2020.