Charting the Moral Universe: Capturing Virtues and Values of Data Visualization Practice

Abstract

What do we value in our visualizations, and in the people who design them? Despite a growing body of work on critical data visualization, the conception of what it is to do ethical data visualization work can often be narrow (for instance, holding that our ethical duties are discharged merely by avoiding overtly lying or manipulating data), or entangled with potentially problematic implicit value structures (such as the assumption of the objectivity and neutrality of data, and so the designer's role being merely the passive conveying of numbers as efficiently as possible). Yet, what it means to act ethically in data visualization is broad and multifaceted, and the virtues to which we should aspire as data visualization researchers and designers are worth explicating. We conducted an interview study with a broad spectrum of 20 experienced data visualization researchers, practitioners, and data artists to solicit their values and ethical considerations around doing visualization work. We report on a list of 68 values, organized into nine virtue clusters, that we encountered in our interviews. These virtues and values together describe a diverse space of matters of care and concern in data visualization: from the unease around the best use of visualization as a tool for persuasion, to the tightrope that visualization practitioners often walk between their professional responsibilities and their personal moral commitments. The virtues themselves, as well as our interviewees' reflections on ethical practice, offer practitioners, researchers, and educators in data visualization a richer vocabulary for ethical reflection and provide a broader foundation for considering and applying visualization ethics.