A taxonomy of data visualization projects for alternative narratives

Data-driven alternative narratives are data activism communication practices. Non-expert and bottom-up groups of the datafied society are using open-source tools and data to provide evidence on social issues that have not been covered or made transparent by mainstream and official institutions. Data visualizations are decisive adversarial tools for the purposes of alternative narratives and thus data activism. Data designers assume the role of data intermediaries capable of transforming data into information and bringing it closer to the daily experience of individuals. This study states that data visualization for data activism must disclose their design process in order to communicate not only visual evidence but also the construction of the evidence, thus, democratizing the interpretation of data and its visual representations.“It is essential to recognize and promote practices in order to move towards a critical approach to the process of visual representation of data. Thus, raising knowledge about how data visualization for alternative narratives is occurring and how its construction process is proceeding. This chapter presents a taxonomy of data visualization for alternative narrative projects observing how data visualizations are executed to build up alternative narratives: by monitoring, reporting, investigating, archiving and cohering social movements. The aim of the taxonomy is to organize the exploration of the cases; it is not intended to over-label the organic development of alternative narratives, nor to impose a single classification. The taxonomy is proposed as a starting point for exploring the visual representation of data-driven alternative narratives.