Of Course it's Political! A Critical Inquiry into Underemphasized Dimensions in Civic Text Visualization

Abstract

Recent developments in critical information visualization have brought the field's attention to political, feminist, ethical, and rhetorical aspects of data visualization. However, less work has explored the interplay between design decisions and political ramifications—structures of authority, means of representation, etc. In this paper, we build upon these critical perspectives and highlight the political aspect of civic text visualization especially in the context of democratic decision‐making. Based on a critical analysis of survey papers about text visualization in general, followed by a review on the status quo of text visualization in civics, we argue that civic text visualization inherits an exclusively analytic framing. This framing leads to a series of issues and challenges in the fundamentally political context of civics, such as misinterpretation of data, missing minority voices, and excluding the public from decision making processes. To span this gap between political context and analytic framing, we provide a series of two‐pole conceptual dimensions, such as from singular user to multiple relationships, and from complexity to inclusivity of visualization design. For each dimension, we discuss how the tensions between these poles can help surface the political ramifications of design decisions in civic text visualization. These dimensions can thus help visualization researchers, designers, and practitioners attend more intentionally to these political aspects and inspire their design choices. We conclude by suggesting that these dimensions may be useful for visualization design across a variety of application domains, beyond civic text visualization.

VA + Embeddings STAR: A State‐of‐the‐Art Report on the Use of Embeddings in Visual Analytics

“…Especially for those downstream applications we categorize under the domain of humanities, social sciences, and education , and business, management, governance, law , they intend to assist in the decisionmaking process for governments, companies, and domain specialists. As Baumer et al argue in their recent study [BJSM22], further perspectives beyond the purely analytical one apply in such scenarios (namely, the political one), which must be taken into account when considering the existing or designing new such approaches.…”

Eleven Years of Gender Data Visualization: A Step Towards More Inclusive Gender Representation

“…Correll [23] summarizes several important arguments against the neutrality of visualizations: data itself is not neutral, the absence or presence of information is often a deliberate choice, and the choice of visual encoding techniques profoundly impacts what people see or learn from a visualization. Similar concerns have been raised in work on Critical InfoVis [31], Visualization Mirages [53], Anthropographics [55], and work in a political context [9]. To overcome some of these challenges, Dörk et al [31] outlined a process to examine visualizations for their subjective and interpretive content critically.…”

“…We see our work as part of ongoing efforts in the visualization community to raise awareness of the ethical dimensions of working with and representing data. This conversation has taken place in research papers [9,23,30,55,62], the Vis4Good workshops (https://vis4good.github.io/), and in discussions of diversity within the community itself [65,66,73]. Correll [23] summarizes several important arguments against the neutrality of visualizations: data itself is not neutral, the absence or presence of information is often a deliberate choice, and the choice of visual encoding techniques profoundly impacts what people see or learn from a visualization.…”

From word clouds to Word Rain: Revisiting the classic word cloud to visualize climate change texts

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