As part of Love Data Week 2025 from February 10-14, I hosted a hands-on workshop in the THINC Lab titled “Visualizing Data with Everyday Objects”.
Love Data Week celebrates data in all its forms, and raises awareness about the importance of data science and the management, preservation and ability to access data. This year’s theme is: Who’s data is it, anyways?
In the workshop, we used data from PEN America on books banned in U.S. schools during the 2023-2024 year. We talked about what data visualization is and why it matters, and discussed some of the challenges that come with highly-technical data visualizations.
As part of the workshop, we explored how data feminism plays a crucial role in data visualization. In their book, Data Feminism, Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio articulate seven principles of Data Feminism:
- Examine power. Data feminism begins by analyzing how power operates in the world.
- Challenge power. Data feminism commits to challenging unequal power structures and working toward justice.
- Elevate emotion and embodiment. Data feminism teaches us to value multiple forms of knowledge, including the knowledge that comes from people as living, feeling bodies in the world.
- Rethink binaries and hierarchies. Data feminism requires us to challenge the gender binary, along with other systems of counting and classification that perpetuate oppression.
- Embrace pluralism. Data feminism insists that the most complete knowledge comes from synthesizing multiple perspectives, with priority given to local, Indigenous, and experiential ways of knowing.
- Consider context. Data feminism asserts that data are not neutral or objective. They are the products of unequal social relations, and this context is essential for conducting accurate, ethical analysis.
- Make labor visible. The work of data science, like all work in the world, is the work of many hands. Data feminism makes this labor visible so that it can be recognized and valued.
Then, we turned data visualization into a playful, creative experience using LEGO, Play-doh, yarn, and other everyday objects, and made some interesting and creative visualizations of the books banned in U.S. schools in the 2023-2024 year.
Here are some of the visualizations participants made.
Kiera Obbard 