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In “Lynching, Visualization, and Visibility”, Mullen visualizes the amount and location of Lynchings in United States history. His work is focused on bringing previously invisible data to light as Mullen contrasts the visibility of the act of lynching and its invisibility in government records. Mullen’s highlights the difficulty when dealing with absent data but despite absent data being difficult to fill in, the creation of these data sets importantly shed light on hidden problems. I think that while Mullen is undertaking important and valid work, they created some flawed visuals.

In their post, DG questioned how effective the visuals are and gave strong and valid critiques on all of their visuals. While some of the visuals are clearly flawed, like the first visual showing the number of lynchings per week from 1877-1950. This visual utilized shades of reds that were too close together to easily see differences and the use of by week data seemed to be an odd choice as well. But the authors probably wanted to stay in a red scheme for symbolistic purposes and the choice is understandable. I think Mullen could have spent more time in making effective visuals to further bolster his findings but regardless of the output, the work done in this article provides a template for exploring “missing” history and bringing light to underexposed topics.