Other models for data visualisations

Anonymous

Keywords: data, visualisations, critique, models

TL;DR: Taking data visualisation seriously as a cultural technique also means developing other models for its production and evaluation.

Abstract: Other models of visualising aim at a (re)formulation of contemporary expectations and narratives concerning data and their visualisations as a very specific model of thinking data visualisation. It is precisely how and with what intention we work on and discuss visualisations that defines the conceptual space we open to this cultural technique. The concept of "other models" first points to the consequences and limitations of these ways of thinking. My positioning of the "other" consists first of the description of what it wants to distinguish itself from. I understand the "other visualising" as a chance to make the normative mode of data visualisation visible and discussable. In the discourse of visualisation, there is not yet an established language for critiquing the expectations of data images. The "other visualising" therefore establishes a negative way of reading the cultural and image phenomenon. As a first concretisation of these models, I formulate in the following a differently directed definition: data visualisation as intended violence.