hdw – Looking Outwards – 08

This week I watched the Eyeo Festival video on Policy Brutality in Ferguson from 2015. In the video, Deray Mckesson and Samuel Simyang-we, two advocates for Black Lives Matter, explained how they used informational graphics and data visualization to communicate the exigency of their issue on Twitter platform. Together, they collected and researched data from news articles online and mapped out the location of where each victim was killed on a map, allowing users to further qualify the data set with information about each victim’s age and given cause of death.
Mckesson and Simyang-we discussed how effective data visualization is as a tool for creating systematic change because it appeals to all audiences. It doesn’t matter if the presenter’s audience is for various grassroots organizations, for various policy-makers, or for the general public, the information is digestible and easy for the audience to connect with and process. Before releasing this data and sparking this trend of mapping out race-related police information, many people were not aware of how widespread the issue was. However, after a period of a few months, general public opinion had shifted with over millions of people convinced that policy brutality is a systematic issue.