The Concept of ‘Data Humanism’ in Response to Georgia Lupi’s Works

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF AND RESPONSE OF GIORGIA LUPI
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A critical analysis of and response to the Work and Position of Giorgia Lupi
1 Introduction
This essay critically assesses the concept of ‘data humanism’ in response to Lupi’s works (Lupi, 2017). While Lupi believes that we, as data visualization practitioners, should focus on making data more real and tangible, my perspective of data humanism is that as long as the information is understandable, which means that one can draw patterns or relationships between different variables, then it can be regarded as humanist. As visualization practitioners, we should focus on transforming data into something that is as relatable to the audience as possible, allowing them to interpret concepts, trends, and relationships without straining.
2 Critical Analysis
1 The Artist
Giorgia Lupi is an information designer and a partner at Pentagram in New York. She is an Italian by profession and is famous for her humanistic approach to data. She challenges the impersonality of data and designs and engages in visual narratives that link up numbers to create a visual perspective of what they stand for in terms of telling stories, talking about people, and sharing ideas. She has built rich visually driven experiences in data for various clients including Google, Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, the United Nations, IBM, and Starbucks among others (“Pentagram”). Her perspective on the humanization of data leads to the question of whether indeed data can be human. She tries to make data more tangible, rather than abstract since she believes that such an approach would make it more understandable. This approach makes it important to assess whether indeed data can be converted into a tangible form for it to be understood. In this essay, I believe that even abstract data can be humanized as long as one can relate it to real life situations.
2 Artist’s Perspective
Every activity in the modern world, including the economy and our social lives revolves around data (Mills, 2018). Consequently, unlike Lupi’s assertion of making all data tangible as a way of humanizing it, some of these information represented by data cannot be represented in a tangible manner, but can still be structured in a way that is easier to understand, which means that data can still be humanized but in a different way. Big Data is no longer a mysterious incident reserved for the dystopian future. Instead, it has become a commodity and a special feature in the modern times, prominently used in accounting for different things including currency, goods, and services. For example, the amount of goods sold, the valuation of an economy, and strength of a currency are all expressed in form of data. Today, it is virtually possible to categorize everything in terms of data. For example, we can learn about ourselves by determining the number of times we undertake a given activity, such as checking our phones, dressing, and even receiving compliments, and representing this information in either charts or other ways of data visualization (Lange, 2019). This process of converting the information into co...