lucretia’s 1.8%
idea, code and production
(2018)
Visualising victims of sexual assaults in Denmark. See the project here.
Lucretia’s 1.8% visualises sexual assault in Denmark 2017. The colours: red, turquoise and purple represent respectively:
Red: the calculated number of sexual assaults in Denmark 2016
Turquoise: the number reported to the police in 2016/17
Purple: the number of convicted - 94 out of the 944 reported (Henriksen, 2018).
The colours are directly situated on the sculpture of the Roman woman Lucretia. As told by Ovid, Lucretia committed suicide out of shame after being raped (Tortzen & Holm, 2016).
Additionally, the visualisations are attached with an audio file in which, I as the designer, express some reflections in relation to this.
Lucretia’s 1.8%
The Project
Made as part of my bachelor the overall project examines data visualisation within the context of feminist standpoint theory. With a theoretical starting point in feminist philosopher Donna Haraway (1988) particular attention was paid to questions of objectivity, power, and, in this relation, the rhetorical potential of the data visualization.
One of my key findings was that data visualisations situate themselves by either connecting the data back to the producing bodies or by rendering visible the designer. By doing so they shun the appearance as objective and neutral, meaning that they can be characterised as somewhat expressing a feminist perspective.
Drawing heavily on the book Data Feminism by Laura Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio, I discovered that organising and presenting information is never innocent and neutral.
One might ask why this is important. In this relation, it can be argued that data visualisations wield tremendous rhetorical power due to their often objective and neutral appearances. Furthermore, since data visualisations often find themselves within a knowledge-producing context their rhetorical power should be taken seriously.
Principles for Feminist
Data Visualisations
Drawing on Laura Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio I list below some of the principles for feminist data visualisation which I considered in the creation of Lucretia’s 1.8%
Implement diversity in the visualisation (could be done by recognising feelings and embodiment as a way of knowing).
Challenge the embedding of power in a hierarchical structure, and instead place it within a horizontal system (as an example this could be done by recognising the user as part of the production process).
Make labor visible (make visible the ones’ who have been collecting and produced the data)
Focus on the subjective position of the designer (thus circumventing the visualisation appearing objective and indisputable true)
Read a more in-depth discussion of the points here.
