Data aesthetics
Antonia Walford · 2020
This chapter argues that accurate representation, as one possible aesthetic effect of data, is a result of a process of delicate and committed crafting, of eliciting qualities, forms, patterns, and intensities, and managing their relationship to other forms of social relations. Initiated in 1998, the Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia is responsible for managing, collecting, and making available data from data collection project that at the time had spanned ten years, with the intention of ascertaining the role of the Amazon forest in the global carbon cycle. The form of objectivity ‘persuades’ others not because of the idiosyncratic subjective proclivities of the data cleaners; in the same way as there is an ‘aesthetic’ to universal knowledge evidenced in its various forms – maps, encyclopaedia, archives and databases – so too is there an aesthetic to objectivity. The data set travels as a knowledge object that is presumed to be fully self-relational – that demonstrates relational integrity to itself.