“Reality is manipulated in many ways and does not lie around waiting to be glanced at” (Gad & Jensen, 2010, p. 71)
Spring 2022
Chris Lindgren, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Technical Communication and Data Visualization
Department of English, Virginia Tech
How do we "see" scale? How do we make our reality conspicuous with increasingly larger and bigger datafications of it? What happens when we tokenize it to render claims and evidence about our particular groupings of life, all of which are much larger or smaller than what we can "normally" perceive? This course explores these questions by drawing upon multiple frameworks and methodologies to study the rhetorics, consequences, and potential futures of visualizing our datified lives. We will examine how the boundaries that data and information set impact the conditions of what we know and how we come to know it. This includes understanding the visual rhetorics of data itself, its visualization, as well as the impact these relationships between "seeing" data and communicating it impact audiences across intersections of gender, race, and class.
To accomplish this aim, we will first define the field of visual rhetoric more broadly by reviewing its exigencies and definitions. From there, we will "make conspicuous" (Roundtree, 2013, p. 106) any new connections and boundaries possible between visual rhetoric and areas such as critical data studies, Black feminism, decoloniality, and accessibility / disability studies.
Throughout the course we will also learn some fundamental data and information design practices that use the Python programming language and Google's Colab interactive notebooks.
Background image: Robin Hübscher's haptic data visualization prototype.
CSS Grid template modified from Barefoot's Codepen.