Public Keynote RMeS Winter School: Professor Lauren Klein (Emory University)
The Line Graph and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Modern Data Visualization
Date: 29 January 2025
Time: 15.30-17.00
Venue: Maastricht University – Turnzaal
Registration: VIA THIS LINK.
“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order excavate the meaning—and power—of visualizing data. Exploring two examples of early data visualization—the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and Description of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists—this talk will connect Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race. By examining and re-visualizing the data associated with these charts, I will further show how data visualization always carries a set of implicit assumptions—and, at times, explicit arguments—about how knowledge is produced, and who is authorized to produce it. Placing this work in the context of a larger digital humanities project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, coauthored with members of my research group, I will conclude with a consideration of the ethics of visualization in the present. Through a discussion of contemporary examples, I will show how data visualization can bear witness to instances of oppression at the same time that it can—if intentionally designed—hold space for what cannot be conveyed through data alone.
Biography
Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University. She also serves as director of the Emory Digital Humanities Lab and PI of the Mellon-funded Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Klein’s research brings together computational and critical methods in order to explore questions of gender, race, and justice. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, the award-winning Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her work has appeared in leading humanities journals including PMLA, American Literature, and American Quarterly; and at technical conferences including ACL, EMNLP, and IEEE VIS. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the ACLS, the NEH, and the Mellon Foundation.
