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Critical InfoVis: exploring the politics of visualization
As information visualization is increasingly used to raise awareness about social issues, difficult questions arise about the power of visualization. So far the research community has not given sufficient thought to how values and assumptions pervade information visualization. Taking engaging visualizations as a starting point, we outline a critical approach that promotes disclosure, plurality, contingency, and empowerment. Based on this approach, we pose some challenges and opportunities for visualization researchers and practitioners.
Les Cahiers du Numérique, 2016
We discuss the use of information visualization in digital sociology, (particularly in Controversy Mapping), and its role in outlining issues and objects of study through progressive insights. We believe the differences in visualizations between analysis and presentation are better understood as linked by a chain of transformations, rather than as two separate and stable levels of representation. We propose that, through such chain, two research movements are performed: the reification of issues, related to the construction of a stable consensus, and the reenaction of insights, that points to the role of visualizations as communication tools. We will illustrate such movements and effects by using a few examples of visualizations produced in the EMAPS research project.
Proceeding of the seventh ACM conference on Creativity and cognition - C&C '09, 2009
Data visualization, commonly used to make large sets of numerical data more legible, also has enormous potential as a storytelling tool to elicit insights on long-standing social problems. It can help to synthesize diverse personal narratives about history, causes and impacts, and thereby give a voice to populations seeking to create change. In this work, we explore the potential for using data visualization as a vehicle for social change through creative engagement. Our intent is to design and deploy an interactive visualization of development in the Dominican Republic which brings empathy to the society's cultural psychology, helps frame limitations and challenges, and highlights opportunities for progress. Some of the major challenges in designing this work lie in layering both the "big picture" perspective-historical events and statistical trends-with personal narratives-vivid stories that illuminate the current state of the society. We discuss how this work can foster conversations and promote creative thought, motivating actions that can transform the current state of the country.
This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers’ belief that through visualisation, it is possible to ‘do good with data’ [Periscopic. 2014. Home page. Retrieved from http://www.periscopic.com/\]. We focus on four conventions which imbue visualisations with a sense of objectivity, transparency and facticity. These include: (a) twodimensional viewpoints; (b) clean layouts; (c) geometric shapes and lines; (d) the inclusion of data sources. We argue that thinking about visualisations from a social semiotic standpoint, as we do in this paper by bringing together what visualisation designers say about their intentions with a semiotic analysis of the visualisations they produce, advances understanding of the ways that data visualisations come into being, how they are imbued with particular qualities and how power operates in and through them. Thus, this paper contributes nuanced understanding of data visualisations and their production, by uncovering the ways in which power is at work within them. In turn, it advances debate about data in society and the emerging field of data studies.
Data Visualisation as a Tool for Public Engagement and Empathy Building
2022
Visualisations provide an accessible way to unveil new patterns or promote new perspectives on data. Data visualisations can also aid in highlighting the context and scope of social issues and is a compelling way to disseminate research findings to the general public. This paper presents an interactive exhibit displayed at the 2022 Accelerate Creativity and Innovation Festival, at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. The exhibit utilised participatory and interactive visualisations, prompting visitors to share their experiences regarding trust and respect in maternity care. This case study showcases the potential impact of utilising participatory visualisation activities by a design research team to inform and actively involve museum visitors in exploring sensitive topics surrounding maternity care and postnatal care inequities. The use of these activities allowed for an inclusive experience, encouraging visitors to actively participate, reflect, and contribute to the conversation. Additionally, it allowed the team to disseminate and validate their findings.
The Challenging Power of Data Visualization for Human Rights Advocacy
New Technologies for Human Rights Law and Practice, 2018
In September 2007, The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof traveled with Bill Gates to Africa to look at the work the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was doing to fight AIDS. In an e-mail to a Times graphics editor, Kristof recalls: while setting the trip up, it emerged that his initial interest in giving pots of money to fight disease had arisen after he and melinda read a two-part series of articles i did on third world disease in January 1997. until then, their plan had been to give money mainly to get countries wired and full of computers. bill and melinda recently reread those pieces, and said that it was the second piece in the series, about bad water and diarrhea killing millions of kids a year, that really got them thinking of public health. Great! I was really proud of this impact that my worldwide reporting and 3,500-word article had had. But then bill confessed that actually it wasn't the article itself that had grabbed him so muchit was the graphic. It was just a two column, inside graphic, very simple, listing third world health problems and how many people they kill. but he remembered it after all those years and said that it was the single thing that got him redirected toward public health. No graphic in human history has saved so many lives in africa and asia. 1 Kristof's anecdote illustrates the sometimes unexpected power of data visualization: Expressing quantitative information with visuals can lend urgency to messages and make stories more memorable. Data visualization is the "visual representation of 'data,' defined as information which has been abstracted in some schematic form." 2 The use of data visualization
Data Visualisation Does Political Things
In this paper I advance the theory of critical communication design by exploring the politics of data, information and knowledge visualisation in three bodies of work. Data reflects power relations, special interests and ideologies that determine which data is collected, what data is used and how it is used. In a review of Max Roser's Our World in Data, I develop the concepts of digital positivism, datawash and darkdata. Looking at the Climaps by Emaps project, I describe how knowledge visualisation can support integrated learning on complex problems and nurture relational perception. Finally, I present my own Mapping Climate Communication project and explain how I used discourse mapping to develop the concept of discursive confusion and illustrate contradictions in this politicised area. Critical approaches to information visualisation reject reductive methods in favour of more nuanced ways of presenting information that acknowledge complexity and the political dimension on issues of controversy.