This week’s reading features a web-based data visualization that accompanies the project, Invisible Australians. A research collaboration instigated between Dr. Kate Bagnall and Dr. Tim Sherratt, Invisible Australians was created to identify and reveal the true face of the so-called White Australia during the early 20th century. During this time in White Australia, thousands of non-Europeans residing in the country faced discriminatory laws and policies that denied their rights as Australians. Although shunned and marginalized as a Australian minorities, these non-Europeans, including Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Syrians, and Malyans, were ironically well-documented through government records. Bagnall and Sherratt have taken advantage of these extensive records in order to develop a database intended to commemorate and identify the thousands of non-white Australians who made up the true face of “White Australia”.
While browsing The Real Face of White Australia, I also kept in mind Johanna Drucker’s distinction between capta and data. She emphasizes the need for humanists to utilize conceptual tools like capta and stray away from tools and methods developed from fundamentally epistemological disciplines. This distinction is definitely a core concept to understand when approaching any kind of archived information. When data is presented in a way to prove a certain opinion or thesis, this is essentially converting this hard, cold data into capta. Capta, in Drucker’s definition, carries a constructed interpretation of the data it came from. The Real Face of White Australia is a great example of humanizing data and presenting it in a way to prove a point. The simple composition of “the real face of white australia” at the header of the browser accompanied by a grid layout of all the collected images of these discriminated Australians is for the most part a self-explanatory. A visitor first sees the header and is immediately gratified with Bagnall and Sherratt’s findings. With the documented identities that Bagnall and Sheratt have found, they are ultimately imposing the idea that the true face of Australia was formed by the non-white residents of that time.
Drucker’s distinction between capta and data is a definite step in the right direction for how people typically analyze so-called data visualizations. I feel that we have come to a point where we give the term data too much authority. Too many times have we trusted a visualization that claims to be based on a found set of data, only to later find that certain kinds of data was omitted, duplicated, etc. We need to realize that data is extremely vulnerable to be skewed and constructed to fit the data miner’s own opinionated agenda or perspective.
One project that came to mind was photographer Giles Revell and graphic designer Matt Wiley’s collaborative project called “Photofit: Self-Portraits”. Using a now outdated and disregarded Penry Facial photofit kit from the 1970s which were used for constructing police sketches of suspects, the creative duo called upon a number of test subjects to use the kit to compose their own indetikit image purely by memory. These participants put together the tactile components of the kit which include paper strips of various facial features. The result of these participant interviews and Photofit assemblies reveal the complexity of these participants’ relationship with their self-identity suggesting that their distorted compositions of themselves show more about the subject’s personality than a straight-forward photograph would.
Here the photograph could be considered as the straight-forward data and the test subjects’ photofit compositions of themselves are the capta. Each participants’ own personal perspective about their appearances converts the data of their facial topography into the capta of what they view themselves as.
http://gilesrevell.com/files/photofit2.pdf