Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities Quarterly5, no. 1 (2011)
http://structuralarchaeology.blogspot.com/2011/11/archaeo-toons-secrets-of-stonehenge.html
Johanna Drucker’s article focuses on the concept of data as capta. She argues that because all data is taken through observation and then interpreted, none of it is “given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.” In other words, that knowledge is by default constructed, simply based on our interactions with it. She argues effectively that the traditional data visualization is a tricky and often murky issue. The traditional charts and graphs which present information so clearly and succinctly are often taken at face value as knowledge, when in fact so many decisions and assumptions are included in the visualization. She gives the example of amounts of men and women in certain countries at a certain time. The resultant bar chart is clear, and one can easily make the snap judgement that these are the final statistics pertaining to this question. However, as Drucker delves deeper into the prior assumptions and decisions made by the visualizer, the picture becomes much less clear. She begins with a discussion of the non-binary nature of gender, as well as how socio-cultural norms can effect these statistics – such as when a woman is only socially considered to be (and therefore recorded statistically as) a woman once she is of reproductive age. She goes on to consider how the interpreters have dealt with (or not dealt with) populations crossing national boundaries, skewing the entity of the “nation” represented on the graph, or transient populations which could skew the temporal component. She notes that while the traditional graphs are extremely useful, especially in the case of determining the location of a cholera outbreak, we have to be careful with the information we assume to be knowledge. It may be more useful to humanists to create more complex, messy visualizations that treat our prior assumptions and interpretations of the data up front.
A very similar debate can be found in the field of archaeological theory. In the 1960s, the processual school rose to dominance. This type of theory stresses scientific methods of hypothesis to create general, systems-based explanations for important cross-cultural themes such as the emergence of the state. These incredibly systematic solutions were meant to be diagnostic regardless of the context, and generally removed any focus on the specific culture or human agency. In the late 70’s and 80’s, a reactionary school called postprocessualism arose which was focused much more acutely on individual agency and were incredibly context specific in their analysis. These scholars, in much the same tone as all data being capta, believed that the material record could not be treated outside of its specific context and social interpretation.