Mirrors, not windows

In the past few months I’ve read the drafts of several upcoming visualization books—not only those that will be part of the AK Visualization series, which I co-edit with Tamara Munzner, but also others by authors whose ideas I find stimulating. In May I wrote about Lauren Klein’s Data by Design, and last month I read Rahul Bhargava’s Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information, to be published in November by Oxford University Press.

(Rahul is a professor at Northeastern University, where he leads the Data Culture Group, and he’ll be one of the three speakers at my VizUM 2024—Visualization at the University of Miami—conference on Monday, November 11th. The other two are Lauren herself and Santiago Ortiz. I’ll post more information about this event as soon as we have a website; in the meantime, here’s a link to the previous edition. Attendance is free.)

Anyway, back to Community Data, which you can pre-order already. It’s the kind of visualization book that I enjoy the most, one that challenges my own mindset and praxis. I view visualization in the way I described in this post, while discussing Elsie J. Lee-Robbins’s PhD dissertation on cognitive and affective learning objectives; to me, visualizing is akin to teaching. Rahul’s approach to data displays—not only visualizations, but sonifications or physicalizations—is less hierarchical and unidirectional, and more inclusive and participatory.

Community Data suggests that designers can act sometimes as mere communicators, but that we can also envision ourselves as facilitators or community organizers; we can design for readers, but also with readers.

Moreover, our job shouldn’t be to create windows through which external observers can scrutinize individuals and communities—often without their consent—but mirrors that people can use to better understand themselves and others.

Here’s a key quote about those windows and mirrors:

The benefits of datafication aren’t equally distributed, as several cases discussed in the book illustrate:

Community Data showcases a large variety of projects, many of them intended to encourage social engagement and data literacy, from data murals to data performances, and even data mini-golf courses. Rahul’s 2024 talk ‘Creative Data Representation for Social Justice Movements’ will give you an idea of what to expect from his book:

What I’ve been reading

Besides the drafts mentioned above, here are a few books that I enjoyed in July:

Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. When I was in college I took several elective classes on contemporary history and political philosophy that fueled my fascination for extremist ideologies —and I haven’t stopped reading about them to this day. Paxton’s is a great explanation of what fascism is; not so much an ideology with solid theoretical foundations, like communism or liberalism, but a practice and a movement whose characteristics emerge from the sociocultural peculiarities of the countries where it arises and metastasizes.

Riki Wilchins’s Bad Ink, a thorough critical analysis of why and how The New York Times has fed a reactionary moral panic against gender-diverse youth. I’d pair it with Lewis Raven Wallace’s The View From Somewhere. Both books provide much needed historical context, as this isn’t the first time that the Times has grossly botched its coverage of marginalized minorities, and it won’t be the last. If you’re interested in data, scientific, or journalistic ethics, I recommend both books.

Annette C. Baier’s The Pursuits of Philosophy, a concise biography of David Hume, the greatest empiricist and most agreeable skeptic. While reading it I had the feeling that it’ll end up influencing my own future book, once I manage to finally sit down and start writing it.

Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Oración a Proserpina (A Prayer to Proserpine). Only available in Spanish. You may know Piñol for his bestseller Cold Skin, which became a movie in 2018. His latest novel is a weird and rather entertaining mixture of alternate history, adventure, satire, and horror.

Betina Anton’s Baviera Tropical (Tropical Baviera). Only available in Portuguese. After World War II, the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele fled to Latin America; he lived in Argentina, Paraguay, and ended up in Brazil, where he died in 1979. Anton’s book, a deep journalistic investigation, reads like a spy thriller.

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That’s all for today. I leave you with Deep Purple’s Lazy Sod, one of the singles from their latest album. With the help of their new guitarist, Simon McBride, the band has (re)turned to a straightforward blues-rock style. It’s fun: