Local Data

For Yanni Loukissas, understanding the meaning of data requires that we understand their local conditions of production, dissemination, and use. If data visualization practices normally overlook these local features of data, by presenting data simply as-is, could visualizations be designed to help us perceive its construction?

This series of visualization projects illustrates local features of data that tend to be concealed by more scientific data analyses. Interpreting data from sources like news speech-to-text transcriptions, tax assessments, and the Digital Public Library of America, the visualizations reveal conditions of production that are local to each dataset.