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"The Line Graph and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Modern Data Visualization"
Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University
“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order to excavate the meaning—and power—of visualizing data. 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 Description of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists—this talk will connect Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race.
By examining and re-visualizing the data associated with these charts, Klein 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 work in the context of a larger digital humanities project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, coauthored with members of Klein's research group, she will conclude with a consideration of the ethics of visualization in the present. Through a discussion of contemporary examples, she 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.
Learn More: https://shc.stanford.edu/events/
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa St, Stanford, CA 94305-4003, United States,Stanford, California
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