<p>In the past decades, fields have been the object of intense theoretical and empirical interest. Bourdieu’s approach, in particular, has been the subject of many discussions globally, and has been widely applied. But what was lost in this international circulation of texts is that Bourdieu’s concept owes much to a statistical technique, Geometric Data Analysis. The goal of this article is to show how Bourdieu’s conceptualization was intimately tied to this method of dimensionality reduction. Following other scholars, we demonstrate the role of this statistical method to operationalize a concept Bourdieu started elaborating for about a decade before he began using the method intensively. But we also show how the increasing use of GDA after 1975 might have transformed the visual representation of this concept, and also how it may have altered the use of the concept itself. Upon close inspection of Bourdieu’s published and unpublished work over time, we show that properties of fields that were largely evoked before that date disappeared after; elements that were drawn (by hand) were only mentioned in words after - when they were not dropped altogether. Other aspects took pride of place. The article demonstrates this with two examples: the waning presence of time into field analysis, and the decreasing attention to local differences between individuals. We argue this is due to the inability of the technique to easily account for these two aspects. We conclude by suggesting a few pathways towards an enriched topography of fields.</p>