Touching Variables: Decolonial Approaches and New Tools for Ecological Data Visualization

Abstract

In this article the authors activate decolonial feminist art history as a transdisciplinary protocol for organizing quantitative data. In foregrounding precolonial calculation tools as the basis for a new data visualization method, they present questions about how scientists might negotiate multiple interrelated variables in their research, opening more possibilities for narrating complex causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change and facilitating discussions about the relationship between climate change and settler-colonialism through visual means. While data science has historically prioritized Cartesian and Euclidean geometry as the most efficient tools for data visualization, the authors draw on Indigenous calculation tools that allow for more visual and semantic flexibility than the x-y axis.