Drawing Data: Embodied Mediation and the Evolution of Data Visualization

Gen Witter

Ph.D. Student, University of Oregon

Abstract

This graphic essay examines the distinction between embodied versus digitally mediated methods of data visualization and the impact automation has upon the relationship between researcher and research subject. Establishing an understanding of data as not only a research tool but a rhetorical concept, as argued by Daniel Rosenburg, I discuss the popularization of data visualization in the natural sciences, paying especially close attention to the rise and standardization of natural philosophy practices during the long 18th century. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia offers a meticulous look at the embodied empirical methodologies of the late 17th century and early uses of the microscope. Not only does Hooke painstakingly meditate on his research practices, but he provides the reader with detailed diagrams of his research tools and subjects (such as the microscope and the flea, respectively). The act of drawing requires the hand or another appendage to trace or inscribe lines and shapes that give materiality to otherwise abstract concepts and/or relations. Unlike drawing, artificially generated images are inscribed by an algorithm, which is entirely disconnected from or far removed from bodily processes. In the process of removing the body from acts of inscription and creation, relationality is displaced. Even more so, the subjects of inscription risk being transformed into objects of the research or data visualization process—becoming a means to an end, reduced to the product of an external process. Contemporary machine learning algorithms and modeling programs when compared to Hooke’s empiricism demonstrates how automated, digitally mediated engagement with data reveals research subjects as “standing reserve,” as Martin Heidegger described, for the research process. With automated computing taking over data visualization practices, research subjects’ narratives are lost as they become objects for naturalizing scientific epistemologies. Not only is the agency of the research subject lost through the automated research apparatus, but the aura (Benjamin) emerging from embodied empirical research outcomes dissipates as technological reproducibility takes over. By using the embodied process of drawing, as emphasized in the work of comics scholar Eszter Szép, to complete this graphic essay, my hope is to demonstrate these concepts through the practice of multimodal composition. The graphic essay modality for this project additionally emphasizes the necessity of verbal-visual reading practices, examined through Charles Hatfield’s comics theory, for engaging with data visualization as a medium. Tracing data visualization, both metaphorically and literally, through this project, I will demonstrate the importance of embodied engagement in the act of research and data visualization for preventing the loss of agential relationality between researchers and the subjects they choose to engage with.

Keywords

Data Visualization, Comics, Science and Technology Studies, Robert Hooke, Research Methods