Coffee & Viz considers data colors and cartographies of racism

The best in visualization returns to the Libraries this fall in our Coffee & Viz series. The engrossing series in the Hunt Library’s Teaching and Visualization Studio showcases the unique ways that researchers at NC State and elsewhere are using visualization to enhance their scholarly work.

Coffee & Viz events are free and open to the public; registration is required. For the morning events in this series, complimentary coffee, tea, and light refreshments from local business Anisette will be available beginning at 9:15 a.m. in an adjacent space—to help increase the sustainability of this program, please bring your own coffee mug.

The remaining fall 2022 Coffee & Viz schedule is as follows:

Coffee & Viz in the afternoon: Understanding Color for Data Visualization
Friday, Oct. 21, 1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m.

Computer Science professor Christopher Healey uses color to present large, complex datasets so they can be more easily explored and analyzed. However, understanding how color 'works' is a more fascinating problem involving the physics of light, visual perception, language and culture, and context. Healey’s talk will discuss these issues and demonstrate how they affect the presentation of data. He will also discuss some ongoing projects, including the extensive COVID-19 dashboard. In conjunction with this talk, Libraries staff will also highlight the EnChroma Indoor Color Blind Glasses, which are available to check out from the Wellness & Accessibility technology lending collection.

Coffee & Viz: Mapping Land-Grab and Next
Friday, Nov. 11, 9:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m.

The Land-Grab Universities project presents archival evidence and historical narrative through writing, cartographic design, interactive web map, photography, and open data. In this talk, Margaret Pearce—a Citizen Potawatomi tribal member and cartographer living on Penobscot homelands in Maine, and a 2022 National Geographic Wayfinder Award recipient—will discuss how maps and graphs amplify the Land-Grab project for accountability and specificity, and consider how cartography might contribute to expanding that accountability.

In a related event on Nov. 10, keynote speakers Tristan Ahtone and Robert Lee will discuss the funding of land grant universities through Indigenous land dispossession, and ways that universities are responding to their findings.

Coffee & Viz: Infrastructures of Oppression: Mapping Racism in the Built Environment
Friday, Nov. 18, 9:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m.

Part of GIS Week at NC State, this presentation features research produced in spring 2022 in DIY Cartography, a graduate-level research seminar at NC State’s College of Design led by professors Tania Allen and Sara Queen, that examined the history of racism in our built environment. The featured maps highlight the structural disparities of today overlaid with patterns of confederate memorial erection to expose a palimpsest of institutionalized racism.

As part of a public reckoning with the legacy of infrastructures that perpetuate racism across America, there have been loud calls for dismantling the 2,474 confederate memorials scattered across the landscape. Using data compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Allen and Queen began mapping attributes of the memorials, then used GIS, RAWGraphs, Tableau, and Adobe softwares to overlay memorial data with diverse measures of physical, societal, political, and economic structures that manifest and support systemic racism and ongoing oppression with aims to spark discussion and initiate change.