e-flux Conversations has been closed to new contributions and will remain online as an archive. Check out our new platform for short-form writing, e-flux Notes.

e-flux conversations

What would feminist data visualization look like?

Professor Catherine D’Ignazio speculates about what feminist data visualization may look like for MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog. She writes that data visualization, which attempts to present data analysis as objective (but often isn’t), could pair well with the feminist sentiment that all knowledge is socially situated and often affected by the analyst’s social agenda. The intro is excerpted below, but be sure to follow the link to read D’Ignazio’s thoughts on what feminist data visualization could do.

In January, I’m headed to the Responsible Data Forum’s event about Data Visualization. While there is a lot of hype about data visualization, and a lot of new tools for doing it (my colleague Rahul Bhargava and I have counted over 500!), fewer people are thinking critically about the politics and ethics of representation. This, combined with a chart-scared general public, means that data visualizations wield a tremendous amount of rhetorical power. Even when we rationally know that data visualizations do not represent “the whole world”, we forget that fact and accept charts as facts because they are generalized, scientific and seem to present an expert, neutral point of view.

What’s the issue? Feminist standpoint theory would say that the issue is that all knowledge is socially situated and that the perspectives of oppressed groups including women, minorities and others are systematically excluded from “general” knowledge. Critical cartography would say that maps are sites of power and produce worlds that are intimately bound up with that power. As Denis Wood and John Krygier note, the choice of what to put on a map “… surfaces the problem of knowledge in an inescapable fashion as do symbolization, generalization and classification”. Until we acknowledge and recognize that power of inclusion and exclusion, and develop some visual language for it, we must acknowledge data visualization as one more powerful and flawed tool of oppression.

Can we say this more vividly? Donna Haraway, in her seminal essay on Situated Knowledges, offers a brilliant tour-de-force critiquing not just visual representation but the extreme and perverse privileging of the eyes over the body that has dominated Western thought. If you could, dear reader, read this quote aloud as it truly functions as a piece of performance art:

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of disembodiment.

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit. The eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computed tomography scanners, color-enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office video display terminals, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system.

Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters.

– Donna Haraway in “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective/Feminist Studies” (1988)

The God Trick! Is this not the rhetorical premise and the seductive promise of most data visualization? To see from the perspective of no person, no body? Our appetite for such perspectives is fierce, “gluttonous”, as Haraway characterizes it.

And yet, there are ways to do more responsible representation. There are ways to “situate” data visualization and locate it in concrete bodies and geographies. Critical cartographers, counter-mapping artists, indigenous mappers and others have experimented for years with these methods and we can learn from them.

In the rest of the article, D’Ignazio lays out some thoughts about what feminist data visualization could do: Invent new ways to represent uncertainty, outsides, missing data, and flawed methods; invent new ways to reference the material economy behind the data; and make dissent possible. Read the rest of the text here.

1 Like

I guess the best way to counter this is to value art as a form of “data visualization” in itself. But not one that aims to be a totalitarian truth. One that allows both subjective and objective qualities of a human being to express itself naturally. If that happened, I don’t think such thing as a “feminist data visualization” would be even needed, as something like feminine and masculine are not solid conditions, they are just objective and subjective aspects of our human condition.

Great article but allow a disagreement. My experience tells me that knowledge is more than socially situated, that conscious understanding is not the end all and be all, that we are driven by biology (as human animals our intelligence answers to a biological base and development). Driven by a biology we are not conscious of, hence the blind spot. The other question I bring up is the concept of oppressed groups, including minorities and others… Oppression is the product of strength. For example in the arts the visual becoming captive of the verbal is the result of the academic oppressing the creative artist, or as Susan Sontag put it in Against Interpretation “the revenge of the intellectual against the creative mind”. While the conflicts of power play themselves out both overtly and behind the curtain, behind our blind spot, self-identification as a victim is often a play for power.