From simple tables to complex database searches, humans have created countless technologies for finding just the right data at just the right time. One such technology is the slide chart: a handheld device for on-the-fly calculations and information lookup. Slide charts typically consist of layered pieces of printed cardstock, plastic, or metal, which you can slide or turn to line up the pieces and reveal your desired information. The metal foot measurers at shoe stores are slide charts, as are slide rules and analog flight computers. While the term may be unfamiliar, the objects themselves are surprisingly ubiquitous, finding their way even today into homes, cockpits, classrooms, and healthcare facilities. Slide charts complicate the narrative of print culture smoothly giving way to digital culture, and this presentation uses slide charts as cyphers for examining what information people value and how we’ve chosen to organize, access, and use it over time.

Lauren E. Cagle is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies and Director of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at the University of Kentucky, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in Appalachian Studies. Cagle is also the co-founder and Director of the Kentucky Climate Consortium (KYCC), a multi-institutional network of climate teachers and researchers in Kentucky higher education. Her teaching includes courses on scientific, environmental, and technical communication, and her research focuses on overlaps among digital rhetorics, research ethics, and scientific, environmental, and technical communication, frequently in collaboration with local and regional environmental and technical practitioners such as the Kentucky Division for Air Quality, the Kentucky Geological Survey, the UK Recycling Program, and The Arboretum, State Botanical Garden of Kentucky. She is currently writing a book on slide charts for the Parlor Press X-Series.