Data artivism and feminicide

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2025

This paper advances the notion of "data-inflected visions" to show how various visual representations may come come to be imagined as data, and how doing so opens up different meanings for the political and affective work of data. The visuality of social issues is produced through competing hegemonic and alternative visions, and conventional visualization is not the only format in which data participate in visual contestation. Focusing on Latin American actions to visibilizar feminicide, I propose an encounter with activist-made imagery to elucidate how data participate in alternative representations of the issue. The article contributes both an exploration of the role of data in constructing how feminicide is seen and a novel approach to study data and visuality, to inspire scholars from visual studies and from feminist and critical data and data visualization studies to engage with images beyond conventional graphic representation as sites for the political affective work of data.

Selected Papers of Internet Research, SPIR, 2021

Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 2017

Catherine D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and software developer who focuses on data literacy, feminist technology and civic art. She has run breastpump hackathons, created award-winning water quality sculptures that talk and tweet, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her research at the intersection of gender, technology and the humanities has been published in the Journal of Peer Production, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI). D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization at Emerson College, a faculty director of the Engagement Lab and a research affiliate at the MIT Center for Civic Media.

The Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide, 2023

Collectif Féminicides Par Compagnons ou Ex, Feminizidmap, Kathomi Gatwiri, Savia Hasanova, Anna Kapushenko, Lyubava Malysheva, Saide Mobayed Vega, Audrey Mugeni, Rosalind Page, Ivonne Ramírez, Helena Suárez Val, Dawn Wilcox, and Aimee Zambrano Ortiz This chapter weaves together, as nodes in a network of care, the experiences of activists collecting feminicide data in France, Germany, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Russia, the United States, and Venezuela. In our work, we draw from a long genealogy of feminist research and activism on femicide/feminicide and gender-related violence. To contextualise our practices, we draw on data activism and data feminism as theoretical lenses. Methodologically, we inhabited each other’s experiences through an iterative conversation and co-writing session where we reflected on questions related to the context of our work, our data-making process, the mental and emotional toll, and the challenges and opportunities of generating feminicide data. The experiences of producing feminicide data we share here, together with others around the world, are valuable because they show how women organise to fight against the inequalities that affect us every day.

Papeles del CEIC, 2022

Documenting the invisible: how Data activism Fills visual gaps Documentar lo invisible: cómo el activismo de datos llena los vacíos visuales

This article examines, from the perspective of data activism, how some organizations are developing new languages to talk about invisibility, disappearance, and liminality. To do this, it uses open source intelligence (known as OSINT), maps, and public and citizen data. Examining four pioneering projects which incorporate these practices (Forensic Architecture, Bellingcat, Syrian Archive, and the work of activist María Salguero), the article discusses how technologies such as OSINT and maps can serve to chart the previously unmapped and, by doing so, shed light on the agency and destinies of invisible people. Facing traditional ways of talking about abuse and suffering in documentaries, this type of data activism offers counter-narratives that renew the visual language to deal with human rights abuses. By embracing OSINT and maps to visualize disappearance, data activism has gained the precision of digital tools and has influenced investigative and journalistic practices. This analysis also suggests that OSINT and digital cartography could be part of a renewal in documentary production.

The Journal of Community Informatics

Current efforts to build data literacy focus on technology-centered approaches, overlooking creative non-digital opportunities. This case study is an example of how to implement a Popular Education-inspired approach to building participatory and impactful data literacy using a set of visual arts activities with students at an alternative school in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. As a result of the project data literacy among participants increased, and the project initiated a sustained interest within the school community in using data to tell stories and create social change.

Networked Feminisms. Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices, 2021

2016

—In this paper, we begin to outline how feminist theory may be productively applied to information visualization research and practice. Other technology-and design-oriented fields such as Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Humanities, and Geography/GIS have begun to incorporate feminist principles into their research. Feminism is not (just) about women, but rather draws our attention to questions of epistemology – who is included in dominant ways of producing and communicating knowledge and whose perspectives are marginalized. We describe potential applications of feminist theory to influence the information design process as well as to shape the outputs from that process.