This essay by Alex Sherman is a response to the 6th seminar in CESTA's Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series, "Data That Divides Us." This session was titled "Data, Catastrophe, Transformation", and featured Jessica Otis from George Mason University and Dagomar Degroot from Georgetown University, who talked about the intricate relationship between catastrophe and data through early modern sources.

The common ground that I am most excited to discuss in these talks by Professors Jessica Otis and Dagomar Degroot is danger: how data has historically served as a way to manage very real and threatening dangers, both to reduce them and to identify ways to exploit them for personal or collective advantage. Throughout our discussion tonight, I’d propose that it’s especially helpful to keep that tangible danger as the backdrop. And I’d offer that, even as so much of the data we talk about arises directly or indirectly from warfare, policing, surveillance, and so on, the topics of tonight’s talks are somewhat unique in foregrounding data that is meant to very directly inform survival. The shared engagement with material dangers also stems from a shared engagement with more-than-human worlds of weather and pathogens. The data we are discussing tonight does not just index language, social relations, politics, and so on, but the relationship among people and agents or forces that are, in immensely consequential ways, beyond us—even as they also make our lives (and deaths) possible and are, in part but not in whole, produced by our actions. Finally, too, there is a shared proximity to the natural sciences in both the topics and the types of data we’re discussing tonight, such as tree rings and death tallies.

I should clarify I say all this as a scholar in English literature, who writes about fictional and nonfictional representations of danger and about literature and science, but whose data is generally from or about texts, and where my field’s “interdisciplinarity” often means approaching other humanities disciplines (e.g., history) or the social sciences (e.g., education), rather than the natural sciences. It’s obvious but essential to point out that there are different kinds of data that have different relationships to people, to the world, and to our existing orders of knowledge, and that our discussion should take those differences into account.

There’s a lot more that’s fascinating about your work together and individually—I also considered asking about the difficulties of coordinating spaces and times in your data, how they represent (or don’t represent) human mobility, and how both seem maybe uniquely detached from the scale of the nation-state and instead foreground the city or the region—but I am going to focus on danger to try to offer questions pertinent to both of your work that I hope might be helpful tonight. The questions move along a progression from the initial quantifying process as response to danger—how the numeric form relates to fear—the representation of those numbers in other forms—and how people interact with these mediated forms of danger.

First, I broadly wonder about the quantifying impulse as response to danger. Why are enumeration, arithmetic, and statistical analyses favored ways of encountering dangers from both changing climate and from infectious disease, both historically and in the present? What are some key junctures in this history? What are the strengths and shortcomings of the quantitative management of dangers, again both as articulated by people in the past and in your own judgment? And what are alternatives that we might want to consider, as foils, as complements, or as just better options? I’m thinking specifically here about Jessica’s discussion of how the bills of mortality were one of the first formats that turned qualitative data into quantitative, doing away with lists of names to instead just give numbers of people; and Dagomar’s arguments about how contemporary work in “history of climate and society” sometimes encounters problems in relying too much on numerical data and statistical methods, where I wonder about the urge behind that reliance (and, in a maybe more niche direction, maybe also wonder about the long history of measuring the weather, particularly at sea, which has its own interesting history of quantification as a way to pinpoint changing and dangerous conditions).

Second, and more specifically, what are the affective affordances of putting danger in the form of numbers? In other words, how does producing, encountering, and analyzing quantitative data about danger make us more or less afraid (or afraid in different ways)? On the one hand, numbers—and I really mean numbers, and I’ll talk about visualization in a moment—seem so much less horrifying than, say, seeing black boils erupting or watching floodwaters rise. Perhaps numbers thus enable adaptations to or exploitations of dangers that might otherwise be too scary to confront (and I have seen this in accounts of sailors’ responses to weather readings); but perhaps they also encourage risky behavior (and we might think about the literal world of difference that 1 degree vs 2 degrees of global heating makes, despite how insignificant a single symbol looks). On the other hand, though, there is also a peculiar terror that comes from numbers’ silence and how, when we linger over them, they suggest unimaginable, overwhelming suffering; I’m thinking here of something like the SlaveVoyages project that, as scholars have argued, abstracts the deaths of enslaved people into numbers and perpetuates the terror of transatlantic slavery, and of Jessica Marie Johnson’s argument that this data is evidence of terror. Obviously, there is much more to say about fear as a reaction to plague and to climate change, but I’m trying to get at the role of the number per se in stoking or shifting that fear.

Third, and very closely related, is how data about quantified dangers becomes visualized—or not. For the bills, one of the most interesting things about these in retrospect is the refusal of the map or of any visual representation, instead just embracing the ledger format with Arabic numerals, even as Jessica and her collaborators’ work does make visualizations from them. For historical climate data, in contrast, so much of what you showed, Dagomar, are translations of numbers into other forms, most prominently literal heatmaps, as well as moving images. A particularly interesting case is the translation of tree rings, a physical object that already makes climactic conditions visible, into quantities and data visualizations. How did (and do) visual representations change people’s understanding of and reaction to the dangers represented? How were they deliberately formed to minimize, maximize, manage, or otherwise condition those reactions? And how do you think about your own visualizing practices—what are you trying to achieve in the way you depict them and how do you think it lands?

Finally, thinking of the seminar theme, I wonder how divides in data literacy can set up stark material divides when the data is about life-threatening dangers. People are endangered differently depending on their ability to make useful representations of danger and to understand how these representations map onto their worlds. While divides in data literacy are always important, the stakes here, namely survival, make the issue much more charged. I’m thinking about Jessica’s research on how people became used to working with Arabic numerals in England: before the understanding of what numbers mean is just recognizing that certain signs stand for quantities. And such literacy is not just an individual process, of course, since this literacy is inculcated or blocked by a whole complex web of powerful, conflicting systems and actors, and the literacy can be much more collective than individual. How do you see literacy with numerical and visual representations of these dangerous phenomena developing in your contexts? How does that literacy divide populations or shape collective responses to dangers?

Thank you both for visiting CESTA and for sharing your work about such wonderful and important projects. I’m looking forward to talking more about how your work ultimately bears on collective survival past, present, and future.