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In the article “Lynching, Visualization and Visibility” by Lincoln Mullen, Mullen highlights how data can be perceived differently without the context alongside it. In the piece, Mullen looks at historical data of lynchings, a controversial and saddening part of American history. The writer also highlights the work of another journalist, Mathews, who looked at the same given data alongside a strong religious understanding of the act. As a result of this, Mathews drew a very different conclusion on the historical data than Mullen did. Mathews visualized the data without looking only at the empirical data, but rather, the history and religious significance behind the act to find out why it was caused. This writer looked at the trends of data, and took from it not their significance, but what it said about the religious understanding of lynching. I found this wildly confusing. Matthews argued that with a lack of lynching data, it meant, essentially, that more lynchings were happening during that time period due to the understanding that lynching was “a ritual that made power visible, yet its power depended in part on its lack of visibility in the official records”. So basically, at times were there was less information available about lynchings, more lynchings were taking place. To echo what RF said in their blog post, “the context in which we read and visualize data can sometimes be just as powerful as the insights themselves.” Reading this article was incredibly eye opening as it essentially rebuffs any information taken down about lynching acts ever and that same information has given us a warped understanding of history as a result.