The purpose of this research is to write a history of tables and graphs, then to use that historical insight to understand how such new representational techniques influenced scientific reasoning. More specifically, the focal concern is how new representational techniques influenced the transition from taxonomic logic (that arranges items by categories) to functional logic (that establishes continuous relationships between variables). The project will accomplish this by first surveying the use of tables and graphs in the published scientific literature since the Renaissance, then studying the context of such representations to understand how they were used by scientists to draw inferences about nature.
