Overview

When we encounter a line graph or a pie chart, we tend to think of the role of visualization—if we think of it at all—as simply revealing the meaning of the data underneath. The reality, however, is that the act of visualizing data generates meaning in and of itself.

In this talk, “The Line Graph and the Slave Ship,” Lauren Klein and Tanvi Sharma return to the origins of modern data visualization in order to excavate this meaning. Exploring two examples of early data visualization—the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and the Diagram of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists—Klein and Sharma will connect Enlightenment theories of visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about race and nation. By examining and re-visualizing the data associated with these charts, they will further show how data visualization always carries a set of implicit assumptions—and, at times, explicit arguments—about how knowledge is produced, and who is authorized to produce it.

Placing this visualization work in the context of their larger project, Data By Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, Klein and Sharma will conclude with a consideration of the ethics of visualization in the present. Through a discussion of contemporary examples, they will show how data visualization can bear witness to instances of oppression at the same time that it can—if intentionally designed—hold space for what cannot be conveyed through data alone.

About the Speakers

Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.

Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a focus on issues of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists, and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. In 2017, she was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed.

She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her current project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1786-1900, was recently funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant.

Tanvi Sharma is a product designer and graduate student at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, where she helps develop products for the Center for Responsible AI. She also serves as the lead product designer on Data by Design, a born-digital book on the history of data visualization. As both an academic and a practitioner, Tanvi’s interests span from understanding to enhancing the convergence of social experience, aesthetics, and language (in addition to nurturing native plants on the side).

Event Details

Time:
Thursday, March 30, 2023
3-4 p.m. EDT

Location:
Franke Family Digital Humanities Laboratory
Sterling Memorial Library
120 High Street, New Haven, CT 06511

Registration

This event is open to all, though registration is required. To register, visit the Eventbrite page for the talk. Please note that due to technical constraints, the talk will be held in-person only and will not be streamed.

This event is co-sponsored by the DHLab, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, and the Department of Computer Science.

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