Even though Drucker’s article was mostly about how we visually represent knowledge it was definitely about how we represent knowledge as data too. Today I looked at Max Fisher’s map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries. A few questions came to mind. The main one being how did he turn the data of racial intolerance into capta? How was he able to take something as hard to define as racism and qualify it into a visual representation? The short answer is, he didn’t even collect his data correctly. Racial intolerance is something that changes from group to group and definitely from country to country.
According to Siddhartha Mitter’s article about Fisher’s map “The Cartography of Bullshit“, Iranians were asked about Zoroastrians; Puerto Ricans about Spiritists; Tanzanians, about witchdoctors, etc… Despite the questions being different the answers were presented as the same. All of the answers to the leading questions in Fisher’s survey I assume got put into an algorithm with the output being a country’s intolerance level. But this data is not something that can put on the nice blue to red color axis we see on his map. It would be much better to use a model similar to Drucker’s bar graph for gender data as both gender and race issues do not fit on a simple binary and it’s misleading when they are presented as such in data visualizations. This type of data cannot be measured on one metric.
The main problem I have with Fisher’s map is that even though it would be incredible difficult to visually represent this data he messed up at the initially step of turning the capta into truthful data. I think that the survey might have been designed a certain way or the data might have been manipulated in order to be able to represent that data in a visual format, specifically the map. Unfortunately with the current state of out understanding of data visualization, a strict textual representation might be the only way we can truthfully represent knowledge that ambiguous classification. But forcing data that can’t be easily defined as capta into a visual format Fisher misled and created a problematic info-graphic that people are going to be ready to believe even though that the data itself on a fundamental level is flawed.
