Precarious Data: Crack, Opioids, and Enacting a Social Justice Ethic in Data Visualization Practice

Visualizing a Drug Abuse Epidemic: Media Coverage, Opioids, and the Racialized Construction of Public Health Frameworks

“…I used a collection of 58 articles published in mainstream news media about the opioid epidemic compiled for another study (Welhausen, 2022). In that study, I collected 140 data visualizations from three mainstream media sources to compare those published during the crack and opioid epidemics.…”

“…The beginning date was chosen as The New York Times reported on a landmark study (see Case & Deaton, 2015) that day (see Kolata, 2015), which found a dramatic increase in mortality rates among middle-aged, White Americans, drawing national media attention to the opioid epidemic. I chose the end date to avoid overrepresenting the number of data visualizations of the opioid epidemic included in that study (see Welhausen, 2022). I then reviewed each graphic to ensure that opioids were the main subject matter of the article in which the graphic was published, and I excluded articles that included reprints or interactive visualizations as well as those published in broadcast news reports.…”

“…To determine themes in the data visualizations, I compiled information about the specific data source(s) used for each of the graphics, and I drew on a previous analysis (see Welhausen, 2022) in which I analyzed the specific themes of every graphic. Tracking the data source only conveys where the data were acquired (i.e., from a specific government agency like CDC or the DEA) and not necessarily the subject matter of the graphic.…”

“…Some scholarship on the visual rhetoric of drug epidemics, too, has been directed toward other graphical forms such as data visualizations. More specifically, I analyzed and compared a collection of graphics published during the crack and opioid epidemics (Welhausen, 2022). Nearly 30 years earlier, Orcutt and Turner (1993) also focused on these visual forms, arguing that several news articles published data visualizations constructed from misleading numeric information during the crack epidemic in order to bolster the media driven "'feeding frenzy' of drug coverage" (p. 191).…”

“…Because reporting strategies that emphasize criminalization-like law and order rhetoric (Altheide & Schneider, 2013)-are so common, the specific ways that this narrative has been constructed is well established by media (e.g., Alexandrescu, 2014;Orsini, 2017) and communication studies (Russell et al, 2019;Swalve & DeFoster, 2016;Willis & Painter, 2018) as well as by research in health policy (McGinty et al, 2016;McGinty et al 2019;Shachar et al, 2020) and sociology (Weidner, 2009). Visuals also play a powerful role in constructing media narratives (Coleman, 2010) with scholars in psychiatry (Netherland & Hansen, 2016;Hansen, 2017) and media studies (Jernigan & Dorfman, 1996) focusing on imagery and scholars in sociology (Orcutt & Turner, 1993) and technical and professional communication (TPC) (Welhausen, 2022) analyzing data visualizations. However, the ways that visual and linguistic/textual modes may work together in this context to advance and reinforce a particular perspective have not been explored.…”