Placemats is a collaborative weaving project to produce data visualizations. Using the HASTAC blog and social media, we will collect submissions of keywords in advance of the conference that signify points of connection, shared experiences, or commonalities during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These keywords form the foundation (by labeling the warp strands) of each woven piece. The body of the fabric (the weft) is created collaboratively at the event as conference participants weave into the areas that speak to them, connecting their own experience of COVID to that of others and creating a tactile visualization of the “quantified self-in-kinship” (Knight). The resultant data visualizations are characterized by uneven textures, gaps, and other irregularities. On one hand, these defy the norms of proper weaving practice; on the other, the tactile and visual experience of the finished visualizations aligns with the sense that we have experienced (are indeed still experiencing) collective trauma. The material forms of the visualizations echo Andres Ramirez Gaviria’s framing of artistic data visualizations that are not trying to efficiently convey information but instead explore questions or issues in a way not possible via other means (482).
By crowdsourcing emotions and experiences and weaving collectively in community at the conference, Placemats draws upon multiple of D’Ignazio and Klein’s principles for feminist data visualization, specifically their call to “consider context,” “legitimize embodiment and affect,” and “make labor visible” (3-4). The visualizations produced are small in scale, akin to a placemat, and the aesthetics and contours of each placemat is specific to the particular time and place of its creation.
The placemat, as a feature of the kitchen table, reminds us of the many ways in which the boundaries of our homes took on different meanings during the pandemic. In regard to previous projects, we have argued that “the kitchen table has long held a place in the public imagination as a site of nourishment, family gathering, and care, but it also has served as an important hub of political organizing and movement-building. As a space of gathering both domestic and social, the kitchen table stands at the intersection of the personal and the political. It fosters the creation of intimate connection and affinity that enables collectives to prepare to engage in more public-facing work” (Wu et al.). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the kitchen table continues to be multivalent for an even wider group of people, transformed into office, studio, school room, game hall, and more. With the Placemats project, we aim to document COVID-19 with data textiles that memorialize shared experiences and provide soft and tactile reflective guides at the kitchen tables of the future.
For HASTAC 23: Critical Making and Social Justice, we invite participants to weave with us, creating a Placemat specifically for June 8 – 10, 2023 at the Pratt Institute as part of the HASTAC 2023 conference.
The project will be available in the Student Union while registration is open on Thursday, June 8 and Friday, June 9. The final weaving will be displayed in the Steuben Gallery on Saturday, June 10.
Works Cited
D’Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren F. Klein. “Feminist Data Visualization.” Proceedings from the Workshop on Visualization for Digital Humanities. IEEE VIS Conference. 2016.
Gaviria, Andres Ramirez. “When is Information Visualization Art? Determining the Critical Criteria.” Leonardo, vol. 41, no. 5, 2008, pp. 479-82.
Knight, Kim Brillante. “Wearable Interfaces, Networked Bodies, and Feminist Sleeper Agents.” The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. Edited by Jentery Sayers. Routledge, 2018.
Wu, Hong-An, Wendy Sung, Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, and Kim Brillante Knight. “Stitch n' Glitch: Teetering on the "/".” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, vol. 21, Buzzademia: Scholarship in the Internet Vernacular, Fall 2019.
