Tied in Knots: A Case Study on Anthropographic Data Visualization About Sexual Harassment in the Academy

Abstract

With this pictorial we present the design process of “The Academia is Tied in Knots”, an interactive visualization based on sensitive and qualitative data, namely personal stories reported by people who have experienced sexual harassment in academia. We discuss how we approached the task of visualizing sensitive, uncomfortable, yet important topics in terms of data-mapping and visual representation, including the appropriateness of computational vs. manual approaches to help foreground relevant themes. We also describe the design process behind the visualization and we discuss it from a feminist data visualization perspective.