Muller highlighted interesting thoughts of how visualization was used to look into the horrors and demographics of the history within lynchings. I found it interesting how visualizations can thoroughly illustrate the past. Understanding these concepts of how visualization can be used within analysis promotes brainstorms for my final project, hoping to be able to use visualization to help observers of all backgrounds understand the data I have collected and questioned. The author of November 8 – Lynching, Visualization and Visibility, highlights my exact thoughts with “an example of how the presentation of visual data in ways that the general public can easily understand and absorb is not only effective communication of information but also a way of making knowledge and history that would otherwise be ignored accessible to all,” supporting my thoughts and views on my own final presentation coming up.

This rather unique article shine light on the history of lynching. Donald Mathews argues, “that lynching can be understood as a religious ritual, a symbolic act as pregnant with religious meanings as with political meanings.” Furthermore, the history if lynching is our course conversational, yet in order to have clear and honest debate about its significance in American history, it remains necessary to find the facts. They key findings from state that, “the demographics, economics, seasons, and politics of lynching were patterned and correlated statistically to establish trends.”

‘jnichols99’ seems to find the following findings important. “the demographics, economics, seasons, and politics of lynching were patterned and correlated statistically to establish trends” and “Just as a data visualization reveals the pattern of the points plotted more readily than it reveals the people behind those data points”. I also agree that this point of the article is key at bringing data to life, a trend we have seen in many other articles this semester. We continue to find interesting questions, highly clogged with disorganized data, hiding all important incite. And specifically relating to this historical context, it is necessary to bring some clarity to a topic with such historical relevance.

In the article, Lynching, Visualization, Visibility, the article talks about how data visualizations can help discover hidden trends that ultimately took place when these lynching occurred. Although the data collected was important, I genuinely believe the visualizations produced did not help with any new or essential trends that were deemed not discovered prior to the author’s research. Historically, I do not not think we need extra data visualizations in order to make it clear that lynchings were based on power, constantly promoted through white supremacy. The idea that people needed these researchers to confirm this fact through graphs and charts is evidently futile and redundant. The numerical data published by anti-lynching activists were essential to the prevention of this horrible act, but the theoretical data that these researchers are perpetuating does not find any functional use considering these conclusions were already arrived at. I agree with the statement RF provides when he says, “This same ignorance can be seen in our attitude towards police brutality.  While the federal government gathers no official records of police brutality, the records that do exist at the federal Justice Department are known to undercount these records.” I think that  data like police brutality should be numerically published because this type of information can actually provide knowledge that has the ability to culturally change this behavior.

I really found this article about the dynamics of American films in Aurstralia as I am a film fanatic. I love movies and its very interesting to see that the United States expects that American films will make 10% of the revenue it makes in America in Australia. The 10% rule is what this article is about, and it was derived on the film’s marketing, advertising spending, release scheduling, and the “number of prints abroad based on its home performance”. Just like many things now this study was made possible by the great increase in digital sources of information. Some of my skepticism of the 10% rule is that the database that this idea was founding on “does not track other types of viewing such as DVD, streaming, illegal downloading, etc.” I know this would be very hard data to capture but it feels wrong to not include DVD’s. DVD’s have a profit margin of 67% which can greatly contribute to a movie’s success. The statistical analysis was conducted using non-parametric test which have lower power and will present less statistically significant results.  Also, not as important but really caught my interest was that documentaries peaked interest more than action/adventure movies in Australia. I also liked the images a lot they (for the most part) were easy to follow and help clarify a lot of the text that was going on.

I really found this article about the dynamics of American films in Aurstralia as I am a film fanatic. I love movies and its very interesting to see that the United States expects that American films will make 10% of the revenue it makes in America in Australia. The 10% rule is what this article is about, and it was derived on the film’s marketing, advertising spending, release scheduling, and the “number of prints abroad based on its home performance”. Just like many things now this study was made possible by the great increase in digital sources of information. Some of my skepticism of the 10% rule is that the database that this idea was founding on “does not track other types of viewing such as DVD, streaming, illegal downloading, etc.” I know this would be very hard data to capture but it feels wrong to not include DVD’s. DVD’s have a profit margin of 67% which can greatly contribute to a movie’s success. The statistical analysis was conducted using non-parametric test which have lower power and will present less statistically significant results.  Also, not as important but really caught my interest was that documentaries peaked interest more than action/adventure movies in Australia. I also liked the images a lot they (for the most part) were easy to follow and help clarify a lot of the text that was going on.

Lincoln A. Mullen’s article chose “lynching” as an example to talk about how great visualizing data is. It tells how lynching was a big problem and how it did not get attention until data was visualized. The reason behind that might be what CM-B said in his response, November 8 – Lynching, Visualization, and Visibility, that plain data is not as easy to be absorbed as much as visualized data. Not just that it also shows how after this visualized data many good consequences happened as other studies that fall under injustice, racism and white supremacy.

The movie industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, with some of the largest franchises and movies making over a billion dollars upon release. American movies always make most of their money domestically, but there are some “rules” as to how much they’ll make abroad. One of those rules is the 10% rule that states that a movie will make around 10% as much in Australia as it did in the states.

In “Understanding the dynamics between the United States and Australian film markets: testing the ‘10% rule'”, the authors used data from lots of different movies from across many years to prove that there is a lot more going on than the 10% rule. Some films that don’t preform as well in the U.S., like “Noah”, perform very well in Australia because of the religious influences the movie has. They proved the rule to be wrong with their findings, and as usual, data disproved a common belief that had no grounding in the facts.

In RF’s post “Data in the shadows”, they explain how public discourse affects what data is collected. When accurate data isn’t being collected, the public can be mislead to the severity of a situation. This shows the importance of data, but it also shows how dependent we are on perception and image as a  society. If public opinion states that something is important, there will be more data collected on it, which can be devastating to the people who are gone before the public changes their mind.

From the previous reading responses, I could not agree more with the person who authored “Reading Response 11/6.” I also had a fairly narrow idea of where feminist theory could be applied, especially in a data setting.  Feminist theory seems equipped to deal with many issues in the data field and data visualizations sub-field.

Speaking of data visualizations, the graphics used by Mullen in “Lynching, Visualization, and Visibility” aided in the argument Mullen put forward.   The data visualizations helped bring the invisible, the records of the lynchings, to being visible using graphs and geographical representations of where they were most prevalent.  I also liked how Mullen acknowledged that the article is not to offer an analysis of the data, but simply to show how the visualizations can show patterns.  There are certainly limitations of this.  It relies on complete and accurate data.  This is as much of an issue for the data on lynching as it is for police violence.  However, I still think the article achieves its goal of making the invisible, visiible

The reading for today, by Lincoln A. Mullen,  is an example of how the presentation of visual data in ways that the general public can easily understand and absorb is not only effective communication of information but also a way of making knowledge and history that would otherwise be ignored accessible to all. Some parts of the text explain how so many governmental offenses to the basic human rights of individuals are legalized simply because the law refuses to acknowledge them or because they are “invisible”.  I think data visualization is useful most especially in cases like these because by presenting such masses of data the public get to see and acknowledge what is being done and the scale at which it is done and then choose what to do with this knowledge. They could become part of the movement against it.

In reading Lynching, Visualization, and Visibility, I am very interested in the ways that public discourse shapes the way in which we collect and record data.  This issue is well understood in terms of violence against African-Americans. Until anti-lynching activists gathered and published data about the number of lynchings that took place and where they occured, there was no official record on these events.  I believe that this creates a pernicious feedback loop that enables more lynchings to occur. Because of the government’s ignorance towards these acts of hate, so many go undocumented. As a result, when research is published about this violence, there is a drastic underestimation of lynchings which results in an underwhelming public response.  I believe that this allows violence to persist while forcing researchers and advocates to dig deep in the shadows for evidence. This is the true evil power of data invisibility.

This phenomena is not unique to lynching though. This same ignorance can be seen in our attitude towards police brutality.  While the federal government gathers no official records of police brutality, the records that do exist at the federal Justice Department are known to undercount these records.  While the recent killings of certain African-Americans bring police violence to the headlines, it’s important to realize that these events do not represent a rise in violence but rather a “fill in the blanks”.  These events have always occurred. By choosing not to record them however, they do not get the public attention they deserve. This is a serious issue and another example of data inequality that exists in our society.      

In EC’s response, Lynching Data?, they believe that by eliminating the story or context surrounding data, one is in turn eliminating the effect that raw data has on us.  I agree with EC because data without context is less accurate. In the case of Lynching, seeing a visual representation of lynchings in the southeastern United States is misleading.  While the data does represent the aggregate number of lynchings, it’s important to know that these data points were not actually recorded at the time. This information gives us valuable insight to how society saw African-Americans at the time which is important in understand the power dynamics of the time.