Data Visualization

Alice McGrath | 25 February 2025

Overview

1. Discussion of the readings
2. Reviewing examples
3. What makes a good data viz?

Readings & discussion

Data X Design

Visualzations by William Playfair (left) and Shanawdithit (right), from Data x Design, Introduction

“Introduction: A Counterhistory of Data Visulization”

• What is important about the visual & digital form of this chapter?
• Why does it matter which examples we use to tell the history of data visualization?

Data Humanism

Giorgia Lupi: “The Revolution will be Visualized”

Data Humanism, a visual manifesto, by Giorgia Lupi

What makes data “human”?

What about “humanistic”?

Visualization examples

Ex. 1 Warming Stripes

Ed Hawkins, University of Reading, 2018. See also this interactive version here or read more about its growing influence

• What’s the message of this viz?
• Why is this effective?

Ex. 2: Wealth, shown to scale

Matt Korostoff (2021); NB: the original version (MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth) is no longer available, this adaptation by Omar A. Douglass is pretty close: Wealth To Scale, adapted for classroom. Various other translations and adaptations are available here.

Ex. 3: Dunham’s Data

Interactive Flow of Katherine Dunham’s Dancers, Drummers, and Singers (2019)

• Read about the Dunham’s Data project: dunhamsdata.org

• See also: “Visceral Data for Dance Histories: Katherine Dunham’s People, Places, and Pieces”, Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit, The Drama Review 66.1 (March 2022)

Ex. 4: Reach of Racism

NY Times: Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys (3/19/2018)

• NB: url is paywalled - see access instructions here.
• See also: more info about the study by Opportunity Insights that developed the data

W.E.B. Du Bois: Data Portraits

Chart from Du Bois’s 1900 “The Exhibition of American Negroes,” featured in Data by Design ch. 5

See also

• Library of Congress: Charts and graphs showing the condition of African Americans at the turn of the century exhibited at the Paris Expositions Universelle in 1900

• Blog post about the exposition by Ellen Terrell: “Du Bois in Paris”

• Rusert and Battle-Baptiste, W.E.B. Du Bois’s data portraits: visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018)

• The Du Bois Data Portrait Challenge, an effort to recreate these visualizations using contemporary tools

• See also the data on their github repository

Other examples

• Physicalizations and Visualizations from the “Energy Afterlives” 360: in Dalton Hall and on the Scalar site

• The Shape of Dreams (Google Trends), Federica Fragapane, 2020.

  • Medium post: Visualizing the Shape of Dreams

Questions to ask

• How does it affect you? Why?
• What message is it trying to communicate?
• What questions does it raise?

What makes a good data viz?

Inspiration

• For choosing visualizations: From Data to Viz
• Dear Data project, Georgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec
• Winners of the Information is Beautiful Awards
• Use your imagination! Draw your visualization on paper.

Correlation is not causation

See other Spurious Correlations, by Tyler Vigen.

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