Johanna Drucker: The Ethics of Aesthetics

UCLA Distinguished Professor of Information Studies Johanna Drucker recently joined in a conversation with author Gill Eapen on “The Ethics of Aesthetics: Visualizing Catastrophe and Alphabet Histories” for his “Scientific Sense” podcast. Drucker, who is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, shared her perspectives on the history of visualizing aspects of global occurrences such as the Black Plague and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as her work to introduce 21st Century, technology-weary students to hands-on discovery and learning. 

Drucker discussed how painters in the Middle Ages depicted the Black Plague, in contrast to how qualitative COVID-19 statistics can be used to convey the scope of the pandemic and evoke emotion in viewers through graphics with color, intensity, tone, and rate of change.

“I think that one of the opportunities that we need to explore within the range of information visualization is the extent to which the rhetoric of visualization can more passionately communicate the crises and difficulties that we face at various moments in contemporary life,” Drucker said. “An interesting thing occurs in the 18th Century as the very beginnings of social science start to take shape as a discourse and a discipline. In that period, a number of very innovative graphic designers and statisticians, like William Playfair, most notably… Joseph Priestley and others, began to develop the graphic language for translating statistical information about nation- states, population, demographics, into very legible, visual form. And the forms are elegant, legible, they’re beautiful. 

“But what they tend to do is to take away the human face. They aggregate information. We see trends, we see groupings. We don’t see what it means for someone to be suffering from a disease. It’s not that we want to turn all information visualization into cartoons. But I think that there are aspects of … the way that affect can be really sort of produced through reaction and provocation to a visualization…. There are things that … would communicate more affectively to readers, where asymmetries exist, where intervention might make a difference. So, I’m just calling for a broadening of the graphical vocabulary that is more responsible to what I consider the ethical dimensions of presentation of information.”

Professor Drucker, who teaches a course on sustainability in special collections libraries, said that the strong social justice mission of UCLA’s Department of Information Studies supports the idea of creating and maintaining sustainable practices.

“I keep saying to the students, you can’t have social justice without environmental justice, they’re very much linked to each other,” she notes. “This is ethics again. How do we make the best use of the intellectual tools we have - whether it’s data, statistics, visualization, feedback loops, technology – to give people the option to actually do things that are not just for their own good, but for the common good?”

Drucker, who also has taught UCLA courses in drawing and in letterpress printing, shared her observations of how to engage today’s students who have not received more lessons in tasks that are done by hand, which used to be part of a traditional education. 

“The downside is, I think, the capacity to concentrate, to read, to become absorbed in work,” Drucker said. “That has diminished. One of the things I try to do is engineer assignments that give students access to the pleasure of concentration, to the pleasure of engagement with work. If you can get them to start down a rabbit hole where they don’t want to stop, it’s like you’ve given them access to a mode of engaging with knowledge that they can make use of in any other domain.”

On Thursday, Feb. 17 at 8 a.m. PST, Professor Drucker will give a virtual talk on “Ethics and Semiotics of Visualizing Archives through Interfaces” during the IMACTIS seminar, “Images Today: Archives, Identities, and Algorithms,” which is taking place at the University of Liège.

To join this event, visit this Teams link. For more information, view the program.

To view a video of Professor Drucker and Gill Eapen’s conversation on “The Ethics of Aesthetics: Visualizing Catastrophe and Alphabet Histories,” visit “Scientific Sense” on YouTube.