Co-seminar in Anthropology (Half-Term): Ethnographic Data Visualization

This seminar advances frameworks and methods of data visualization as a form of analysis and expression in anthropology. First, we reveal the disciplinary history of computation and both the fallacies and critiques of datafication. Looking forward, we explore how interactive data vis. makes relationships visible, complexities intelligible, and could re-render the enduring aporia of conveying diverse spatial and temporal scales. Participants learn to visualize and map aggregate, impersonal data together with basic methods of presence-based documentary filmmaking. Then, we experiment with synthesizing these modes in a wider ethnographic frame.