  With changing attitudes around knowledge, medicine, art, and technology, the
human body has become a source of information and, ultimately, shareable and
analyzable data. Centuries of illustrations and visualizations of the body
occur within particular historical, social, and political contexts. These
contexts are enmeshed in different so-called data cultures: ways that data,
knowledge, and information are conceptualized and collected, structured and
shared. In this work, we explore how information about the body was collected
as well as the circulation, impact, and persuasive force of the resulting
images. We show how mindfulness of data cultural influences remain crucial for
today's designers, researchers, and consumers of visualizations. We conclude
with a call for the field to reflect on how visualizations are not timeless and
contextless mirrors on objective data, but as much a product of our time and
place as the visualizations of the past.
