Dissing Information
Following my Disinformation Visualization workshop at the Info Activism Camp, the wonderful people at the Tactical Tech Collective have invited me to publish these ideas as an essay on their site. I am cross-posting the opening here and encourage you to read the whole thing on the Visualizing Advocacy site (and get their wonderful book … Continue reading Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis (the essay)
The 1st Open Knowledge Festival was also the host of the 1st Dis-Information-Visualization workshop, a critical attempt to actively explore the dark side of information visualization. In the full day workshop (led by me, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and organized by Pixelache and the Mushrooming Network) 4 groups were encouraged to lie with infographics. Rather than falsifying the data, the dis-info-visualizers have manipulated its meaning by creating truthful, yet misleading representations.
We started with an introductory presentation offering a few critical tools through which to investigate (and generate) visual manipulation. The talk suggested that rather than looking at data information visualization as “Beautiful Evidence” (to quote the title of a book by Edward Tufte) we should read them as often beautiful and sometimes even seductive arguments.
Continue reading “Dis-Information-Visualization Workshop Summary / Helsinki Sep 2012”
