Chapter 2A World of Conversation
Figure 2.1: “Snake Oil Supplements? Scientific evidence for popular health supplements”
The experienced person is always undogmatic.
—Joan‐Carles Mèlich
Besides the functionalist‐idealist and the pragmatist discourses, Murray Dick's The Infographic identifies two others in the academic and professional literature about visualization: the didactic‐persuasive and the expressionist‐aesthete. The former discourse, which Dick exemplifies with Otto Neurath, Marie Reidemeister, and Gerd Arntz's Isotype picture language, emphasizes visualization as an educational instrument for social change.
Dick explains the expressionist‐aesthete discourse referring to the work of designer and author David McCandless (Figure 2.1). This discourse “is bound up in expressive experimentalism, with a premium on aesthetics and an emphasis on the importance of play and fun.”
Visualization discourses will keep appearing, as people from increasingly diverse cultural and professional backgrounds embrace the language. For example, I think that we can already acknowledge a critical, intersectional feminist discourse, whose most salient exponent is Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein's Data Feminism (2020). This discourse analyzes hierarchies, privilege, and power in visualization not just related to sex and gender, but also to race, ethnicity, ...
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