Short Abstract:

How can we advance visualisation practices in STS? This workshop uses participants' visualizations, as the subject of collaborative analysis and 'reworking' in order to explore how they re-present, enact and propose worlds, and, in doing so, how they create arraignments, divisions and collectives. Preregister via here: https://goo.gl/forms/CcXMgdvezNf1eSvP2

Long Abstract:

How can we advance visualisation practices as modes of doing STS? While STS has been at the forefront of analyzing the role of visualizations in scientific practice (e.g. Latour, Lynch & Woolgar, Daston & Galison etc.), the role of visualizations in STS has gained little attention. In this workshop, we put to 'trial' our own visualisations and visual practices. In so doing, we invite participants to bring visualizations drawn from their past or ongoing projects which will be used as a reource for the cross-examination of visualization practices in STS. In groups, we will first analyze these visualisations, and invite participants to consider typical STS questions, such as: How do these visualisations re-present the world? How do they draw together? How do they bring different entities and elements into a single and consistent plane? How are entities included into collectives and what gets excluded, or othered? What are the visualization techniques employed to include and exclude and how are they enacted? What are the agencies, competencies and politics behind them? In a second step, we will re-work these visualisations, based on the analysis gained in the first step. We will aim to include hitherto forgotten objects and actors as well proposing virtual entities in order to consider how visualisation can move analysis from the reflexive to considerations of the speculative. This will involve trying different perspectives in order to see what happens if others (experts, scholars, practitioners, implicated actors and so on) become invested in our own visualisations.

Preregister via here: https://goo.gl/forms/CcXMgdvezNf1eSvP2