Critique of Data Visualisation, Graphic Medicine and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Data sets were plentifully used in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although they were utilized for documentation, policy formulation, course correction, and 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. Quarrelling with such decontextualized, depersonalized, and hegemonic impacts 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. Using close reading of 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 the 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 “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.