Ishani Anwesha Joshi
ABSTRACT
Critique of Data Visualisation, Graphic Medicine and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Ishani Anwesha Joshi
National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli
Sathyaraj Venkatesan
National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli
Data sets were plentifully used in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic. Though they were utilized for documentation, policy formulation, course correction, research among others, data sets relentlessly reduced human beings to mere numbers and glossed over the affective and emotional experiences which characterize our lived experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quarreling with such decontextualized, depersonalized, and hegemonic impact of data, graphic medicine while not entirely dismissive of the performative authority of data, criticizes and supplements data only to arrive at a complex model of data. Close reading comic panels created by Andy Warner, Sarah Firth, and Randall Munroe, the present article demonstrates how graphic medicine imagines different ways of engaging data through enfolding social/individual and structures of feeling to convey the embodied nature of our existence. Put differently, graphic medicine rematerializes and reclaims the individuals from datasets through a process which we call as “redrawing.” Redrawing is a textual practice and strategic engagement with the authority of visual/verbal discourses and its attendant technologies through rhetorical operations of irony, satire and genre blending among others. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to humanize, contextualize, and sensitively present data so as to convey the collective, entangled and affective nature of our existence.
Key Words: data, data visualizations, graphic medicine, COVID-19, redrawing
BIO
Ishani Anwesha Joshi is a doctoral graduate student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. Her ongoing Ph. D dissertation concentrates on COVID-19 and Graphic Medicine. She is interested in the field of Graphic Medicine, Feminism, Gender studies, and dystopian literature among others.
Dr. Sathyaraj Venkatesan is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy (India). He is the author of six books and over ninety research publications that span African American literature, Health Humanities, Graphic Medicine, Film studies, and other literary and culture studies disciplines. He is most recently co-author of Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine (New York/London: Routledge, 2021) and India Retold (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021).