Visually Comparing Difficult Histories

I kept going back to the Two Plantations project this weekend, thinking I was missing a larger abstract that would answer the many growing questions I had each time I interacted with it— questions about the project itself, its methods of visualization, its authors, and its intent. In my most generous interpretation I concluded that my main reason for coming back to this project was that I was not given enough context about the process, its original goals and how it met them or where it met its failures. In previous projects we’ve examined such as the Caribbean Digital Archive or the Colored Conventions Project, I was able to interpret a bit more about the results given the analysis of the methods, intent, team, and the process used, but the Two Plantations project offered very little on the site beyond an introductory paragraph or two.

We have discussed that Digital Humanities projects can reveal more during the process of synthesis rather than at the conclusion, and in this sense I was ultimately frustrated with the site and the visualization qua visualization. I believe the narrative and information that could have been given to me with a more robust datavis design is likely lost to the book about the larger project (link in the biography of the Principal Investigator, Richard Dunn). In speaking about what visual data is and isn’t, what does it say about the website itself (not the interactive family tree visualization and its choices) that the one full color high resolution picture of a person is of the scholar themselves, and that the names of the subjects are limited to abstract squares and circles on a screen (or in a different artifact, the database of names/pivot table)? I was unfortunately too distracted by this question, as well as the question that seemed obvious and mean to me: did Dunn ask why the racialized names were so different on each plantation, if his data about these names were correct, and either way if also it were correct to expose his audience to it without context? (Should I just read the book?)

When reading Jessica Marie Johnson’s review of the Two Plantations project and her opinion that the site was as “gorgeous” I resisted, but I now interpret this to be in line with my analysis as well: the high gloss presentation of the design of the website can be distracting from the design of the content itself. As Johnson points out, was a family tree the best visualization for this analysis? It does serve to illustrate the short lifespan and difficult “family ties,” but does this represent the overarching statement that “both plantations suffered?”

More questions: Is bloodline archival research inherently colonist and is that OK for this project? What is meant when Dunn says “did interracial sex affect the meaning of relationships” during the 1800s here, and is this a “thorny question” or wildly inaccurate? Benign in comparison, is this type of representation the best format with which to compare two data sets of any kind? I found it distracting to flip back and forth between the two tabs (even with more Dixons in the Mount Airy data!).

At some point either reading about this or “Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data” I was reminded of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Visualizations, which I recently became aware of. Some of these visualizations are so original in their representations that I also like asking “Is this the best way to show this data?” frequently when viewing them, but unlike Two Plantations it is clear to me that this question had been carefully considered, even in the most experimental or even unsuccessful images. In considering data visualizations as a whole this week, I am considering how similarly to maps, they often must tread the line between 1:1 representation and and an abstraction that communicates implicit information.

1 thought on “Visually Comparing Difficult Histories

  1. Bianca F.-C. Calabresi (she/they)

    Thanks for this, Rachel. You clarified some of the aspects that were bothering me and also created for me a disconnect between Johnson’s description, which seemed so full of detail and thoughtful analysis, and the site itself which seemed somewhat simpler and more opaque than I had expected. I found the reproduction of what I take to be Dunn’s handwritten genealogy disconcerting: it both highlighted and didn’t contextualize his own role in organizing this data. The project seems long in inception: some of the terms and approaches seem not to acknowledge new and more critically precise discussions of the history of enslavement. I would love to see re-visions of Two Plantations recognizing the multiple temporalities of the project.

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