Critical Visualization: Rethinking the Representation of Data

Information may be beautiful, but our decisions about the data we choose to represent and how we represent it are never neutral. Peter A. Hall and Patricio Davila’s insightful history traces how data visualization accompanied modern technologies of war, colonialism and the management of social issues of poverty, health and crime. Their discussion is based around seventy examples of visualization, from Florence Nightingale’s diagrams of causes of mortality in the Crimean War to contemporary projects that show the true cost of coal and the fate of our rubbish, taking a participatory approach to visualizing cities. This analysis places visualization in its theoretical and cultural contexts, providing a critical framework for understanding the history of information design with new directions for contemporary practice.