Critical Data Visualization: History, Theory, and Practice

Today, visualization is seen as a crucial tool for understanding, navigating, and acting upon the vast amounts of data produced in contemporary society. Everything from government statistics and environmental monitoring to cell-phone tracking and online shopping are made comprehensible by becoming visual. But most data designers—and most data consumers— engage little if at all with the broader assumptions, meaning, and politics of these graphics, and the history of visualization is usually reduced to a simplistic story of cumulative progress. This seminar will instead approach visualization from a critical historical perspective. We will ask how visualization encourages certain kinds of visibility but not others, how various theories of visual communication support or undermine different forms of politics, how visualization is—or should be—embedded in specific cultures, and how the identity or the methods of the person doing the visualizing can—or should—matter. The course is structured as a hybrid between a readings-based discussion seminar and a hands on workshop. We will engage with scholarship about data, graphics, and visual argument since the eighteenth century, but I will also give in-class demonstrations of software and graphic design techniques and we will use class time to present and discuss student work in a studio-like atmosphere. The reading load is less than in other humanities seminars so that students can spend significant time outside of class becoming proficient in their choice of software.