Anti-AAPI Hate Incidents
September 2022
Nightingale is an online and print magazine of the Data Visualization Society, a community of data visualization professionals. For their second print issue, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec created an analogue data creation challenge called Dear Nightingale: Paper and NO Pencil? The challenge was to create a handmade data object to visualize a dataset but drawing was not allowed.
In July 2022, Stop AAPI Hate released a report of the 11,500 reported hate incidents between March 19, 2020 and March 31, 2022. Within their technical appendix, they had broken out the types of reported anti-AAPI hate incidents. It was important to me to visualize this kind of data because I personally experienced and reported anti-AAPI hate incidents during those two years.
Type: Art installation
Tools: Paper, pen
Featured in:
Nightingale Magazine’s “Paper and NO Pencil” challenge
The process
I thought it would be impactful to visualize this data with human figures to humanize the data. It took me about one week of cutting 1,595 human figures to visualize the magnitude of the issue at hand.
What I Learned
At this point in my career, this was the first time I wanted to push myself to create a data art installation piece and challenge myself to break away from bar charts and line charts. Thinking outside your comfort zones and looking to other sources of inspiration takes time and practice. At the root of this piece, the question I wanted to keep focusing on was, “How can I create an impactful impression, even if it’s only for a brief moment in time?” I was imagining this piece as if I was given a space in a museum to create this visualization. I’ve learned to appreciate the data artists that work in this space because going against the grain to create something original is not easy at all.