What We Preserve

Mark Bradbourne hosts Just 5 Minutes, a podcast explores various themes around Tableau, data visualization, and life in general in just 5 minutes. The brevity is its strength, providing insightful nuggets faster than you can get a coffee these days. His latest asks if data visualization is “art” and he discovered a “crisis of foundation.”

Of course, I had to respond. Mark’s crisis of foundation sits on two key crumbling points: 1, defining art and 2, collective memory.

Defining Art

Mark discusses the emotional impact of an exhibit he visited. Emotions are one aspect of art, as succinctly defined by Merriam Webster (no blog is complete without a visit to this trusty dictionary).

The key part to this is the first definition: created with imagination and skill that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings. Note the conjuctions here. We need imagination and skill, but what it achieves can be variable. Also note what is missing in this very broad definition: time and preservation. Now the fun part: is data visualization art?

I’ll lean a bit on the 3rd part of the definition: the methods and medium. Data is a part of the semantics of the medium. Just like painters need to use any type of paint, there is wide variability in how data visualization as art can be deployed. Some creators, like Georgia Lupi and Mona Chalabi leave no doubt that their work is art. The styles are different, as are the goals. Yet the imagination and skills behind these compositions are clear. The effects inform, delight, stun, and evoke a response. Lilach Manheim Laurio and Neil Richards also provide a body of work that is worthy of being called art. Lilach plays with metaphor and Neil experiments with abstraction – both execute with imagination and skill that is definitely beautiful and expresses ideas.

So, short answer is yes, data visualization CAN be art. I’ll let the experts hash out exactly where to draw the line on what is and isn’t art. Or ask Art Decider on Twitter.

Collective Memory

For me, what we remember stood out most in Mark’s crisis of foundation. Collective memory binds us together, creating a shared history of our values. It provides the ultimate fingerprint for what matters – or does it?

In The Ethics of Memory, Avishai Margalit explores what it means to remember as a collective. What happens when we remember the deed, but not the name: is that enough? But memories aren’t shared uniformly. The names we preserve and the stories we tell are indicative of the culture we preserve and create. In particular, Margalit explored tragedies and how we remember victims. Margalit and the work from Black Lives Matter around #SayTheirNames center around the principle idea that we remember those whose names we preserve. Those tragedies become shared memories.

In a different medium on MasterClass, Cornel West explores memory and how we bring the past forward through the idea of sankofa, an idea from the Akan people of Ghana. Sankofa in Twi (an Akan language) means to retrieve. By remembering the past, we can see where we are in the present. For West, this allows us to see progress.

We also care about how we’re remembered long after we’re gone. We die two deaths, one physical when we pass and the other when no one remembers us and our name. Mortality is a part of our struggle, one both philosophy and religion aim to address.

Is our work memorable and will people go to great lengths to preserve these bits and bytes we go to great lengths to create? To me, this is the larger part of Mark’s crisis of foundation. We want our work to matter in some small way. We want our fingerprints felt, observed, and perhaps briefly part of a smile. We want the data points we bring to life to preserve our own life. It is, after all, something we spent a fair whack of time doing.

I think some visualizations, like art, will survive the test of time. How they’re preserved will vary widely. Many antique pieces we have today have lost their hues, or parts of their context. Like art, I see preservation of digital assets also in a varied state. Some pieces vanish to bitrot, while others hold steady. Only time will tell.