UC San Diego

This dissertation is the first in-depth study of a new important area of contemporary visual and digital culture - data visualization. First developed at the end of the 18th and early 19th century, data visualization until recently has been understood as an analytic tool for expert use. However, a growing number of projects have challenged these assumptions. The expansion of a data visualization into art (including many exhibitions in leading art museums), social activities, and nearly every dimension of life that begins around 2004 indicates a far more complex set of interactions between representation, viewer, and data than it was assumed earlier. While a small handful of scholars have begun to investigate data visualization’s untraditional or alternative uses, there is still no in-depth study of how and why data visualization functions in contemporary society and culture.

My work lays the groundwork for seeing data visualization as a socially and culturally situated medium and practice. I examine my subjects by combing methods and concepts from a number of disciplines: media studies, art history, cognitive science, and design. These disciplines have not been brought together so far in investigating contemporary data visualization culture, so this is a methodological innovation of the dissertation.

The presentation of the material is organized into two parts. The first part presents a cultural history of data visualization as it has developed alongside digital culture and technology since 1970s until the present. In the second part, I analyze how data visualization functions today in different contexts via close reading of select projects. Such close analysis is common in art history, film studies or literary studies, but has not yet been applied to data visualization projects. My readings test theoretical ideas of the dissertation, while also showing how we can how we can think of data visualizations as complex cultural objects not unlike paintings, films or novels.