Stanford Humanities Center
“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order to 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, Klein 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 Klein's research group, she will conclude with a consideration of the ethics of visualization in the present. Through a discussion of contemporary examples, she 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.
Related Event
The day after her lecture, on October 16 from 9:30–10:30 a.m., Klein will offer a workshop for Stanford graduate students at the Humanities Center titled "Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Digital Humanities."
About the Speaker
Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University. She also directs the Digital Humanities Lab there. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
Klein works at the intersection of data science, AI, and the humanities, with an emphasis on research questions of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists, and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. 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, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), which was named one of the “must-read books for Spring 2020” by WIRED magazine. 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.
She is currently completing a digital project, Data by Design: A History in Five Charts, forthcoming from the MIT Press, and envisioning the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network with colleagues at Clark Atlanta and Georgia Tech.
About the Series
Launched in 2022 in partnership with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), Digital Horizons is a lecture series at the intersection of the humanistic and the technological.
When
424 Santa Teresa Street
In Person and Online
Share
Related Events
Sylvester Johnson | Could a Robot Feel Pain? Race, Technology, and the Political Problem of Personhood
Beyond the National Archive: Digital Futures for Gulf Studies
