In collaboration with the Black History Month programming at the SJSU Library, this critical data visualization workshop will start with a hybrid session consisting of a 30-minute presentation and 15-minute Q&A that connect today’s habits of counting, measuring, and tracking to their histories in slavery and surveillance through the work of Hortense J. Spillers, Katherine McKittrick, and Simone Browne. We’ll explore how slave-ship ledgers, “bad” measures, branding, and biometrics show up in contemporary data practices, and how Black, anticolonial ways of knowing offer alternatives that center relation, story, and creativity. In this workshop, we’ll closely dissect a series of real-world charts, maps, and dashboards to see how they misrepresent or flatten lives, histories, and places. In the in-person critical data visualization workshop that follows, you’ll practice spotting choices about scale, category, color, and framing. You’ll leave with a shared vocabulary and a set of guiding questions you can use to evaluate and redesign visualizations in your own work. Register here.