The Demoiselles d'Evanston: On the Aesthetics of the Wigmore Chart

Abstract

Wigmore's ‘The Problem of Proof’, published in 1913, was a path-breaking attempt to systematize the process of drawing inferences from trial evidence. In this paper, written for a conference on visual approaches to evidence, I look at the Wigmore article in relation to cubist art, which coincidentally made its American debut in New York and Chicago the same spring that the article appeared. The point of the paper is to encourage greater attention to the complex meanings embedded in visual diagrams, meanings overlooked by the prevailing cognitive scientific approaches to the Wigmore method.