Dear friends, Alberto here. 

Today we’re releasing our newest course, Data Feminism for Data Visualization, by Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio, which emerges from (and expands) their best-selling book Data Feminism.

While watching Lauren’s and Catherine’s videos I kept returning to Socrates’s apology —in ancient Greece, this meant a rational defense, not an expression of regret— in front of the tribunal that would condemn him to die. The old war veteran and sage told his Athenian peers, “the unexamined life is not worth living”.

I’d argue that Socrates’s words are too hyperbolic, for unexamined lives do have value, so I might rephrase his dictum in the book I’m writing these days as “the examined life is worthier of being lived”. I believe it is.

We could claim something similar about knowledge and professional domains, disciplines, arts, and crafts. They reach maturity when they abandon vulgar self-congratulatory narratives —what I once called the heroic history of information design and visualization, with its crude Western-centric and positivistic nonsense— and instead develop a capacity and a taste for honest self-examination. When they do this, they become worthier.

We are releasing Data Feminism for Data Visualization at a hostile time. In countries such as the United States, obscurantism is on the rise, and contempt for the virtues of curiosity, learning, truthfulness, attention, and care is spreading. Too many knowledge-creation and dissemination institutions —including some in journalism and even in higher education— aren’t just acquiescing to political and governmental pressure, but enthusiastically embracing it. Times like ours demand defiance.

This is why Lauren’s and Catherine’s work, and the work of so many others inspired to follow their path, matters. I hope that, when you watch their course—or read their books, Data Feminism, Counting Feminicide, and Data by Design—you’ll agree. Enjoy.