The Ecologies of Data Visualization

Abstract:This essay evaluates visualization practices in data science and the digital humanities by drawing on the resources of the environmental humanities. I show how certain conceptions of ecology and natural systems have provided constitutive metaphors in the design and theorization of data visualization practices. This genealogy of the visual culture of data science began with the professionalization of graph theory in the nineteenth century. Ecological analogies were also a prominent feature in twentieth-century computer and network design, and they have continued to inform many of the layout algorithms that generate present-day data visualizations. This history of ideas and practices shows how ecological metaphors have naturalized information systems in ways that obscure the material and social realities of those systems.