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As much as humans are visual creatures and are also moved to describe themselves in their environment, Prof. Kate Coddington, PhD, of the Department of Geography, University at Albany (SUNY), gave multiple examples — beyond the ones available in main-stream news sources — during her lunchtime talk, “Feminist Visualization: Practices, Processes, Data, and Creativity.”

As part of Prof. Emily Mitchell-Eaton’s course GEOG 321: Transnational Feminist Geography, Prof. Coddington was invited to give a talk on the different ways people try to describe geographies that are important to them. Beyond the common concept of visualization of data as a mass product to reach the most people, some of the examples Prof. Coddington provided included consideration of not only the message or purpose, but also the identity of the producer, the intended audience, and how accessible was the visualization. 

Examples spanned from the very modern, such as an interactive map that included all the streets in South American and Spain named after women, to the very simple hand-drawn raindrops that filled a bucket, in which each raindrop was a personal testimony from an individual. Others were crowd-sourced, such as a platform that provides an interface to collaboratively record the emotional cartography of queer life. Some examples went out of the arena of maps and into art and ecology, such as one in which South America was envisioned as a human body, with resources taken from the land to provide for that body. Included with each map was a QR code that led to the source so attendees could consider the information on their own.

All of the examples were thought-provoking and provided a great deal of food for thought and discussion for the students and faculty and staff who attended. Many thanks to Prof. Coddington for her insights and her willingness to visit.