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In the article “Lynching, Visualization, and Visibility” Mullen explores how lynching as a religious history aspect is different in many way from lynching in a data collection aspect. They first look at the studies of lynchings with no stories behind them. They make charts of when and where the lynchings occur but they put no story behind them. I think this is problematic because they are looking at a piece of history that is very controversial and by just looking at the raw data I think a lot of the story aspect is lost. The line in the article that reads “lynching was a ritual that made power visible, yet its power depended in part on its lack of visibility in the official records.” As the lynchings were not recorded as legitimate data, making data visualizations of them now is somewhat inaccurate because we are unsure of what information is really accounted for. They then go on to adress how now data visualizations could also be skewed because they do not keep track of things such as when police use brute force. I think we should be learning from the past and taking into account now how people are being treated, we should be learning from our mistakes. We should be addressing racial conflicts and they showed how lynching could have done that and how now we should be addressing that with police brutality and understanding when it really goes in not just sometimes.

As RF said in their blog “the context in which we read and visualize data can sometimes be just as powerful as the insights themselves.” I think this statement is really true, but I think the Lynching article addresses a contradiction to this because it shows how sometimes their might not be enough data collected in order to create a good data visualization.