Data visualization tools carry hidden assumptions that shape humanities research

Evidence

Once the data was collected, I used the software package Tableau Desktop to generate a variety of visualizations to interpret it. Tableau is primarily intended for business analytics and thus its focus is on “actionable results,” not the type of exploration and experimentation that is prized in the humanities. Furthermore, as Drucker warns, “graphical tools are a kind of intellectual Trojan horse, a vehicle through which assumptions about what constitutes information swarm with potent force.” The point of the reflection on my data-gathering process above and the visualization set below is not to provide a data-based “solution” to some verifiable claim, but to use computational means to explore intertextuality with a scope not possible under traditional interpretative means. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 366

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Drucker’s ‘intellectual Trojan horse’ framing about how business-analytics tooling smuggles positivist assumptions into humanities research is genuinely paradigm-challenging for the reader’s own method.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s critical stance on whether the book demonstrates causation vs. correlation — this passage shows the author himself flagging the exploratory, non-verifiable nature of his digital methods.