Wednesday, 27 January

Maps, comics, pie charts, graphs, interactive news articles, instruction manuals – these are things that we rely on to make sense of the world. Data visualisation is a huge, interdisciplinary field, present within all visual media. And yet it can seem almost invisible – hiding in plain sight – often claiming the voice of the dispassionate, objective truth-teller.
In a world where the sheer amount of information can be dizzying, data visualisation can help us understand the bigger picture, break it down into more meaningful components, put things in relation and perspective and help us see big changes that are taking place over eons of time. It can fit information that seems overpowering and limitless into a story, so that we can relate to it.
It can also create a sense of control where there is no control, choose whose story to put forward, hide important information by directing our gaze, or flat out mislead and lie to us.
As we are turning more and more towards the visual over the textual, data visualisation is an exploding field. Being based in the visual field, data visualisation forms our world view in a different way than text does, with different implications.
In this node, we want to look at some of the different professions of the data visualizer, their places and agencies within the journalistic field and explore some of the ethical issues that comes with visualizing the world.

The lecture looks at how major news events have been visualised in the form of infographics. We will look at the “aura of truthfulness” that seems to surround much of infographic reporting – the claim to a neutral, “god’s eye” perspective and the notion that visualisations merely represent “facts”.
The focus is primarily on a few major Swedish newspapers, but by looking at the practice of the newsroom, we aim to show how these newspapers are part of an international supply chain that provides “graphic resources”.
Finally, we will talk about a practice-based approach aimed at finding different ways of representing news stories – hopefully offering new perspectives.
Jöns Mellgren has an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art in London. He’s currently active as a director, writer and illustrator. He’s also a lecturer in illustration at Konstfack. For more than fifteen years he worked with creating infographics for some of Sweden’s biggest newspapers, including Expressen and Dagens Nyheter.