109 | Feminist Data Visualization with Catherine D’Ignazio

Data Stories

[If you enjoy Data Stories, consider supporting us on Patreon. The show is now fully funded by our listeners!]

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We have Catherine D’Ignazio on the show this week to talk about feminist data visualization. Catherine is Assistant Professor of Data Visualization and Civic Media at Emerson College, where she works across art, design, science and research.

On the show Catherine explains how feminist theory can be used as a lens to look at some interesting problems in visualization and data analysis in general. We also talk about the struggle between objectivity and relativism, methods to apply the guidelines proposed by Catherine to data visualization work, and some super interesting projects she has developed over the years.

Enjoy the show!

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http://datastori.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/feminist-vis-promo.m4v

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Links

• Catherine’s project Boston Coastline: Future Past
• Catherine’s project The Babbling Brook
• Catherine’s “What Would Feminist Data Visualization Look Like?”
• Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”
• Giorgia Lupi’s “Manifesto for Data Humanism“
• Michelle Borkin’s What Makes Data Visualization Memorable
• Sandra Harding’s “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity’?”
• Catherine d’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s “Feminist Data Visualization”
• More on Catherine’s “Data Biographies” teaching exercise
• Lauren F. Klein’s “Feminist Data Visualization; Or, the Shape of History”

Chapters

1. Welcome to Data Stories! (00:00:24)

2. Important news: we are crowd-funded! (00:00:57)

http://patreon.com/datastories

3. Thank you to our past sponsors (00:01:27)

4. Ways to support the podcast (00:02:46)

5. Introducing Catherine d'Ignazio (00:04:20)

http://www.kanarinka.com

6. Feminist data visualization (00:09:54)

7. An overview of what feminism is (00:11:35)

8. Data visualization and feminist thought (00:14:41)

9. Where is the line between total objectivity and total relativism? (00:24:41)

10. The collaborative trend: data visualizations being created in pairs (00:33:50)

11. Things to keep in mind to make your data viz more feminist (00:36:30)

12. Catherine's applied project Boston Coastline: Future Past (00:44:54)

http://www.kanarinka.com/project/boston-coastline-future-past/

13. Catherine's project The Babbling Brook (00:48:00)

http://www.kanarinka.com/project/the-babbling-brook/

14. The best and worst jokes from Catherine's Babbling Brook flower (00:50:28)