A workshop to seek interdisciplinary expert perspectives on ethically and visually representing the historical place of misrepresented peoples and locales.
We define ethical visualization as the presentation of visualized information in ways that acknowledge and mitigate the potential for harm engendered within the visualization form and content.
The workshop will further work on ethical visualization in interactive cartographic interfaces specifically. The ultimate goal of the project will be to mine historic corpora for named entities and their descriptors, and then visualize them cartographically to demonstrate what imperialism looked like from a cultural and ideological perspective. Ethically exploring the imagined geography of the French colonial world combines three practices:
The goal of ethical visualization is “increasing understanding while minimizing harm” both to users and to represented people and places (Cairo, 2014). According to Hayden White, “[t]he conjuring up of the past requires art as well as information” (White, 2005). Effective and ethical functionality in historical digital humanities projects demands reconstructing the past in ways that invite users to critically engage with it through considered use of aesthetics as well as computation.
Ethical visualization practices sit at the intersection of humanistic inquiry, ethics, and information design. We define ethical visualization as the presentation of visualized information in ways that acknowledge and mitigate the potential for harm engendered within the visualization form and content. While good information design practice forms the backbone of ethical visualizations, ethical visualization practice goes one step further to consider the ultimate societal impact of such design choices: do such choices cause harm or mislead, either intentionally or unintentionally? Do they result in a net societal benefit, or do they prove deleterious to marginalized individuals? These questions must be brought to the forefront when considering information design, because a visualization can follow recognized information design practices and consequently be easy to understand, but still produce a negative societal impact for its subject matter all the same. With this definition in mind, the planning workshop will explore possibilities for interactive mapping that acknowledge past power disparities while emphasizing the humanity of historical subjects, with particular sensitivity to present-day users with a connection to the represented subjects (such as descendants, ethnic group affinities, and present-day inhabitants of studied areas).
To see the practical steps for how this might be applied the related work on ethical data visualization at https://kathep.github.io/ethics/
See the co-investigators’ paper on this subject:
Katherine Hepworth and Christopher Church. 2018. “Racism in the Machine: Visualization Ethics in Digital Humanities Projects.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12:4.