Tuesday, May 30, 2023, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Lauren Klein, Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods

“The Line Chart and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Data Visualization”

Dr. Klein will describe how data visualization tools such as pie charts, timelines, and other graphic representations of information can often reflect deep and unsettling bias. What we see in “simple” data visualizations can easily be laden “with implicit assumptions—and, at times, explicit arguments—about how knowledge is produced, and who is authorized to produce it.” Dr. Klein will provide a fascinating update on Data by Design, a major new work in the field, in which she is drawing on historical examples, for example from the British colonial era, to illuminate the influence of data visualizations. Some of the examples in the book will reveal the deep cultural and social bias of the times, sometimes at the expense of human dignity.Klein will explain how her project seeks to “create counter-visualizations that can imbue more humanity into the data and to show the broader scope of who can and did create knowledge,” lessons for our own time.