Information may be beautiful, but our decisions about the data we choose to represent and how we represent it are never neutral. This insightful history traces how data visualization accompanied modern technologies of war, colonialism and the management of social issues of poverty, health and crime. Discussion is based around examples of visualization, from the ancient Andean information technology of the quipu to contemporary projects that show the fate of our rubbish and take a participatory approach to visualizing cities. This analysis places visualization in its theoretical and cultural contexts, and provides a critical framework for understanding the history of information design with new directions for contemporary practice.
Author(s): Peter A. Hall, Patricio Dávila
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 255
City: London
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter I: An Introduction to Critical Visualization
A critical framework
Looking at visualization beyond Western paradigms
Synopsis of this book
Distributed cognition and humanistic approaches
Isn’t critique finished?
Chapter II: Disruptive Histories
Positivism and objectivity
A history of progress
Critical cartography: a ‘defining moment’
A few examples: not a canon
Haptic visualization: the quipu (1200–1532)
‘Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship’ (1789)
Polar area diagram (1859)
Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (1802–1875)
Data visualization at the Paris Exposition, W.E.B. Du Bois, (1900)
Community-building with Isotype: Otto and Marie Neurath
Conclusion
Focus Anna Ridler, Myriad (Tulips) 2018
Chapter III: Making Data
Quantitative and qualitative data
The role of categorization
Focus Data4Change
Chapter IV: Data and the Self
Taylorism within?
Comic critique
What is normal?
Biometrics and risk-profiling
Challenging norms
The examined life
Focus Margaret Pearce and Michael Hermann — ‘They Would Not Take Me There: People, Places, and Stories from Champlain’s Travels in Canada, 1603–1616’
Chapter V: Data and the City
Participatory planning: hector
Focus Heath Bunting — Status Project
Chapter VI: Beyond Aesthetics and Representation
Aesthetics and function
Aesthetics and perception
Representation as translation
Chapter VII: Beyond Critical Visualization Practice
Sources
Index
