Guest Lecture on Visualisation in STS, Goldsmiths

Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP), Goldsmiths, University of London, are organising a one day workshop in February.

Creating Better Visualisations (with STS): A workshop with guest lecture by Laura Watts 

Tuesday February 18th, 2020

10am-5pm
Goldsmiths, University of London

Register online.

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.

The workshop will begin with a lecture by Laura Watts (Interdisciplinary Senior Lecturer in Energy & Society, University of Edinburgh and author of ‘Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga’, MIT Press) on ‘Seeing the energy future on the page: working in the whitespace between words’

Workshop participants are asked to bring a visual aspect of their own research project and an interest in opening their project up to engagement with other participants.

Participation is free, and lunch will be served.

Organisation team are Michael Guggenheim, Isaac-Marrero Guillamon and Alex Wilkie.