Introduction

The following progress report on my research into the politics and ideologies of data visualisation, begins with a brief overview of my academic, scholarly and industry-relevant research and includes concise summaries of arguments to be shared in related DICG335 projects.

I am a Bachelor of Arts undergraduate student, majoring in sociology and minoring in design.  Questions of politics and ideology, broad public policy positions and related agendas overlap and concern the agendas of social policy analysts.

My undergraduate training brings the academically relevant study of neoliberalism, population geography and statistics to bear on the progress of my current project.  Relevantly, since 2011 I have conducted independent research into the politics and ideology of data visualisation in examining the social issue known as forced adoption.  I have also undertaken independent historical research into 20th century Australian state welfare policies and practices. This background knowledge informs my current research and provides the interim results of an ongoing case study.  Significantly, I have also sourced the collaborative subject blog, Cybercultures, where  Dr. Christopher Moore recently introduced me to Accelerationism, theories of systems decay, entropy and more.

Resources that have guided the development of my topic thus far are hyperlinked in the following draft outline of my research report. Each of four headings below open with a related concise summary of related arguments to be shared in Assessments 2 & 3.  These summaries have been informed by DIGC335 course material suggests and are paraphrased as block quotes below. The following research has relevance not only to the industries of social work and child welfare but education and software development.

Data visualisation, history and cyberculture

I will argue that data visualisation technology looks to the past as much as it does to the future in thinking about cyberculture and the types of technological, corporate, political, social, and legal changes that have been represented in popular culture.

• Age of the internet and information fatigue and overload
• ’Big Data’
• The heroics of well displayed information
  • Leaders in the field
    • Hans Rosling
    • Making sense of data visualisations
    • Data visualisation and Sociology
• The future of data visualisation
  • Emphasising data over design variation to increase greater scepticism of data, consider new hypothesis.
  • Are we asking too much of technology and not enough of ourselves?

Politics and ideologies of data visualisation 

I will argue that governments and bureaucracies have significant authority in the relationship between the user and the computer, aiming questions of cyberculture at the legitimacy of related structures of command and control.

• Politics of data visualisation
  • Concealment of ideological assumptions and political and ideological agendas.
  • Values inherent in data selection, methods, media and designs.
  • Power relations.
  • Concealment of ideologies and agendas with ‘hard facts’.
  • Visual rhetoric
  • Propaganda101
• Neoliberalism
  • Hegemonic discourse
• Gate Keepers
  • The internet’s gatekeepers
  • Towards a theory of Gatekeeping
  • Algorithms
    • Social media algorithms
• Who has the control?
  • Web-based social movements and marginalised groups.
  • Countering government stats

Case study: Towards a statistical and contextual analysis of forced adoption (unpublished and ongoing)

This emancipatory research was undertaken to examine the statistical grounds for viewing ‘forced adoption’ as a ‘product of the times‘ (see mores of society, predicated by legislation prohibiting their taboos).

It will be employed in the current research to exemplify how the politics and ideologies of data visualisation speak to the limits and affordances of our technology infused realities.

• Significant findings:
  • Illegitimate children are a known targeted group (para 2:14, p.34, Senate Report).
  • Statistical analysis reveals trends at odds with what social scientists regarded as indicative of social mores in 1976 (see Kraus).
  • Forced adoptions peaked between 1953-4, contrary to hegemonic discourse.
  • Historical practices and policies consistently correlated with exponential trends in annual proportions of adoptions to ex-nuptial births.
  • Evidence of a  crisis between 1965-72 and an exponential increase in welfare payments to unmarried women aged 17 and over 1971-72.
  • Underpinning ideologies, such as  euthenics and eugenics (White Australia Policy), suggested systematisation or automation of social and political policies of illegitimate child removal.
  • National and state exponential decline in adoptions circa 1971-2 may be due to social entropy.

Imaginaries and Futures

Scholarly research will be employed to argue that the politics and ideologies of data visualisation speak to a broad range of issues and concerns which have arisen as a result of the proliferation of digitally-enabled communication, networked computation and media technologies and practices.

• Galtung in 1967 – Systems of low and high entropy
• Macrosociology
• A Systems Theory Perspective
  • Growth in a finite world
  • Is infinite growth on a finite planet possible?
•  Accelerationism
  • Accelerate Manifesto 
  • Big idea: Technology grows exponentially
  • Accelerationism: A timely provocation for the critical sociology of education 
• Degrowth
  • Degrowth Movement
  • Acceleration and Degrowth
  • Uneven Earth

Header image:

Infinite Unknown, 2017, retrieved March 16, <http://www.infiniteunknown.net/tag/history/&gt;