This talk will take us back over two hundred years in order to show how data visualization was—and remains—a tremendous form of power. Beginning with two historical examples, the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and "Description of a Slave Ship" (1789), created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists, we will explain how the act of visualizing data has always involved more than just turning numbers into visual form. What forms of information are captured by the data? Whose knowledge does the data represent? What experience does the designer bring to the visualization process? For what purposes, and for whose goals? By describing how our project team has explored these questions in our own major visualization project, Data by Design (MIT Press, 2026), we will show not only how issues of ethics and justice have always been present in the field of data visualization, but also how they continue to offer lessons to those of us who view and design visualizations today.

Lauren Klein is Professor of Data & Decision Sciences and English at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab and the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. Her research brings together computational and critical methods to explore questions of gender, race, and justice, both in early America and today. Klein is the author (with Catherine D’Ignazio) of the award-winning Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), and the editor (with Matthew K. Gold) of Debates in the Digital Humanities (Univ. of Minnesota Press). Her next book is Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science (MIT Press, 2026).

Tanvi is a design technologist working at the intersection of data, aesthetics, and the humanities. She is currently an Art Director at Apple and co-author of Data by Design (MIT Press, 2026). She has previously worked at Pentagram, Public Policy Lab, and Spotify. She lives in Harlem, NY, with her two cats, Yuchi and Bubbles. More at tanvi.network.