ICYMI: Lauren Klein on Rethinking the Origins of Modern Data Visualization

The Line Graph and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Modern Data Visualization

This lecture, presented on April 15, 2025, connects Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race. 

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.