ABSTRACT
In origin, visual methods and the type of emergent data gathered is discipline specific but generally across the social sciences, teachers would look to anthropology as the forerunners who harnessed the utility of photography. John Snow's idea of visually mapping data is not an isolated example of a visual method of data collection. Closer to the social sciences is the work of Charles Booth who initially investigated the class structure and therein poverty in the East End of London. The chapter suggests that visual data can come in different forms and teachers drew on the early construction of maps as a means of identifying, for example, outbreaks of cholera and social deprivation respectively. In the social sciences, such demographic maps continue to identify, for example, areas of deprivation or crime, but contemporary methods draw on sophisticated and evolving technology such as Global Positioning Systems in helping to monitor and track data in furthering the construction of social life.
