A 1580 Map Shows Why Data Visualization Is Never Neutral

There's a difference between showing why something is "never neutral" vs merely "not always neutral".

One example would be sufficient to establish that it is "not always neutral", but I think no example can establish that data visualisation is never neutral.

Data visualisation can never be neutral for the same reason photography can never be neutral - you cannot do it without making endless decisions about framing even if you try and capture your subject ‘neutrally’. What you include, what you don’t, whether your axies focus on the charge range or full numeric ranges and so on. See Susan Sontag’s On Phototography for a deeply considered read on this.

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I ran into this building a site that shows where the money in a litre of petrol goes in Pakistan. Every number comes straight from the regulator's published price notices, so I assumed the chart would be neutral. It wasn't, because the choices were all in the grouping.

I could have split the import price into "crude" and "premium", but the documents print cost and freight as one line. Any split would have been my estimate presented as fact, so it stays one line. A row the document doesn't carry shows as empty, not 0.00, because a zero tells the reader something the source never said. I also renamed a bucket from "The state" to "Government". The figures didn't change, but people read "the state" as something abstract and "government" as someone who takes a cut.

Same data and same sources, but each of those calls changes what a reader walks away believing.