The Age of Visualization Dissensus

My keynote at the VISAP conference and exhibition

On Tuesday I was the keynote speaker at the VISAP conference, which is part of IEEE Vis 2024. In the talk, titled ‘The Age of Visualization Dissensus’, I went deeper into topics that I briefly touched upon in The Art of Insight, and gave a few hints of what I may write about in the future. As I said at the end of the talk, the way we teach visualization is going through a paradigm shift, so we might need to develop “new basics”.

Here’s the recording:

And here are the slides with some notes that I wrote as reminders to myself.

The delivery of the talk felt rushed to me, and I didn’t explain everything as carefully as I would’ve liked to, but I guess it was OK. This was the first time that I reflected on (and rambled a bit about) some of these ideas in front of an audience. The slides contain many links to my sources, and here are some other readings related to topics I mentioned:

‘Eugenic Visuality: Racist Epistemologies from Galton to The Bell Curve’. There’s a book (or more) waiting to be written about the intertwined histories of visualization design, eugenics, and imperialism, and also about how the past of our craft echoes in the present. This paper presents and example.

‘“Only the Old and Sick Will Die” - Reproducing ‘Eugenic Visuality’ in COVID-19 Data Visualization.’ (thanks for the recommendation, Frank.)

Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online.

‘The Image of Objectivity’. Its authors, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, have a wonderful book titled Objectivity, which covers similar ground but with much more detail.

‘Entanglements for Visualization: Changing Research Outcomes through Feminist Theory’, which won this year’s IEEE Vis Best Paper award.

Reimagining Data Visualization to Address Sustainability Goals, a paper that proposes a broad reimagining of what visualization can be.

What else I’ve been doing, reading, or seeing

• I haven’t been able to attend other sessions at Vis 2024, but I’ve kept an eye on papers presented at the conference. You can explore them all through this interactive tool developed by John Guerra and in Devin Lange’s Vis Publications data base.

• There’s a new episode of The Data Journalism Podcast, which I host with my friend Simon Rogers. We talked to Kae Petrin, the data and graphics reporter at Chalkbeat. Kae is also part of the leadership of the Trans Journalists Association, a nonprofit organization that does a lot of good work.

• Andrew McNutt, from the University of Utah, has announced Color Buddy, an interactive tool to generate color palettes for data visualization. Check it out.

• Richard Brath, author of Visualizing with Text, has written about how LLMs can accelerate text analysis and visualization.

• Hans-Jörg Schulz, from Aarhus University, has an amazing website in which he collects and curates visualization learning and teaching resources. I’ve bookmarked it. I hope it’ll be updated regularly.

I’ve also been reading a handful of interesting books—most not related to visualization,—but I’ll write about them in a future post.

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That’s all for today. I leave you with a live recording of Sacred Hour, one of the most iconic songs of Magnum, a British progressive rock band that I’ve been following since the early 1980s. Tony Clarkin, who formed Magnum in the early 1970s, played guitar in the band, and wrote all its songs for more than five decades, passed in January. Rest in peace.