What are the sources and how does the chart accentuate them? It would be great to have a couple more sentences here explaining how to read the diagram

I'm not sure that I totally understood the goal of this section / how it relates to Playfair actually, but I think the idea we're landing on here is that we needed multiple views into the data to really understand what's happening?

If so, I wonder if it might make more sense to show multiple versions of the chart simultaneously as a small multiples instead of having the interactive buttons, which still only show you a "single view" at a time?

Having a hard time tracking the argument here. What am I supposed to be seeing that is demonstrating the value of visualization?

Is iCal supposed to disappear here?

Wait, is this really why we think contemporary people don't understand Playfair's chart as making a colonial argument? It feels unexpected to make a really nuanced point about the social situatedness of these artifacts and then attribute it all to design decisions. Doesn't a contemporary inability to read Playfair's charts a certain way do something to make us critically examine our standpoint, by revealing something about the present's social and ideological landscape and how we construct histories? Maybe the design is part of that, but perhaps there is more to say?

This is super interesting and feels important. I'm reading this and wishing for help here on how to unpack the implications of this. I kind of wish that this main point was signposted in a thesis statement rather than at the end of a paragraph, and expanded on further.

When we talk about Clarkson in Ch 1, we maybe say that abstraction was central to his argument because it helps immediately convey the violence of slavery. Here, we talk about Playfair as intentionally using (even more) abstraction to obscure that violence.

To what extent is the use of abstraction central to making his colonial argument? Also, what's the difference between intentionally obscuring violence through the design of a chart, and not being able to capture the full nuance of a situation as a limitation of a chart? One feels like a malicious act of design and the other feels like an unintended consequence of using data as a medium. These questions feel kind of confusing and I wish there was a bit more clarity here on how we're supposed to interpret what Playfair is doing.

I would prefer this to come before the quote so that when I read it, I understand how to interpret it in the context of your argument. Right now, I read the quote first but it doesn't feel self evident why it's been selected

replace with real em dash?

We're now returning to audience a few paragraphs after the question of audience was introduced and then quickly pivoted away from. There have also been implicit connections to audience throughout the chapter -- both in discussions of Clarkson's audience, and even the idea that there is an ethics to how we as viewers choose to read depictions of violence (are we witnesses, spectators, voyeurs, etc). I would love to see these connections made more explicit.

I agree with others that have said that this feels very important but I would love to see this more explicitly foregrounded in the structure and signposting of the chapter. A stylistic pattern I've noticed a lot here is introducing an important idea, then switching to talking about something totally different, before arriving back at that idea. As a reader, I think it's both making it hard to follow the argument and harder to explicitly draw those conceptual connections across all of the cases and examples.

If the goal here in these few paragraphs is ultimately to argue that Clarkson's use of water is continuous with mainstream histories of visualization, and that this is a reason he should not be overlooked, then it might make sense to open with that argument rather than pivoting to water first and burying the lede (thesis statement)

I found it confusing that the paragraph opens with the question of audience, but instead of going on to fully address that question, concludes by introducing a different question seemingly unrelated to audience (why water) and then discussing that

Probably because I didn't understand the preceding sentence, but I'm confused by the move here. Clarkson would agree with the preceding paragraph but also because we know about Haraway, Browne, & co., we would see more that Clarkson would miss?

Wait, I actually don't understand the point being made here. Clarkson would not disagree that "Description" is a view from nowhere, and that's supported by the fact that it made an emotional appeal? I think I need the connection drawn for me much more explicitly.

The rest of this chapter starts getting very narratively complex very quickly. We introduce Clarkson as the main figure, but the immediately pivot to Elford, compare Elford's diagram to the French image, reintroduce Clarkson, and so on. It took me a few reads to keep track of who was who. I think it would help here to set up either 1) who the figures are, or 2) what the the artifacts are that are being compared/critically examined, and then talk about what we're going to be doing (compare, discuss, evaluate, etc). I think giving a very explicit road map at the level of an "in this essay I will" will be helpful here.

I don't know if the back reference is necessary because the first reference was so tangential that I feel like a reader will see this and wonder if they missed something

This sentence is long and complex -- consider breaking it up

While this might be an understandable question for a piece of data journalism or data art, this does not feel like a safe assumption to make of readers of a scholarly book. For example, when I started reading this chapter, the main question I had was: "what is the main argument of this chapter, and how does it relate to the overarching story that the book is trying to tell?"

Because of this disconnect, I found the opening two paragraphs largely confusing because I wasn't sure how to interpret the anecdotes or contextualize them as part of a broader argument. As others may have written in their feedback, I think this is a symptom of a difference between the expository, observation-first writing style of humanities disciplines vs the style more common in VIS of thesis statement first, then supporting the thesis with argumentation/observational evidence.

This is a general feeling I have about the chapter titles, but I would love for them to be a bit more descriptive of the main idea of the chapter.

For example, I know the team refers to this chapter colloquially as "the labor chapter". I don't think the fact that this chapter is about labor is apparent from the main chapter title, nor does it feel easy to remember and map the chapter titles back onto their contents.

Just to make a case for why I think this is important: as a reader, I will probably read this book and later on want to cite it. I will probably think "oh there was that interesting paragraph about XYZ" and then go to the table of contents to try to remember which chapter it was in. I feel like it might be easier to go through that search process of the titles are more descriptive of each chapter's argument.

Interesting, I'm still reading but are there other places in this book where we discuss measurement and not just representation?

This was one of the core tensions that folks brought up when we were discussing the first two chapters in group meeting --- to what extent are critiques in this book directed at graphic representations and their use, vs are they directed at the idea of data and quantification more broadly?

This is super interesting. I'd love for this idea to not be buried in the middle of a paragraph (and also slowly unpacked further) because I also see the potential here to connect some of the threads of this chapter into an overarching story.

To me, the language of "alternative future" suggests a design process that explores alternate options in parallel. I wonder if to make this more explicit it might be interesting to see the early design work (mentioned earlier and attributed to Tanvi and Shiyao) and show some of your discussions of pros and cons and unpack those tensions explicitly for readers. I feel like in contrast to a visualization of commits, it might be helpful to bring home one of the points of the book which is that design decisions matter, and that different choices of representation relate to their social context in different ways. It could be a way to teach readers by example how to do this kind of design critique and reflection.

this is going to confuse visualization practitioners, who will think you mean something like the Grammar of Graphics or Vega-Lite

How does Listening to Images specifically contribute this understanding? In other words, why do we need Listening to Images to understand this rather than some other theoretical construct being enough, like Haraway?

This feels like a really interesting statement that goes by very quickly. I think it is worth unpacking and dwelling on for much longer, because to me it feels core to the argument that is underneath the surface of this chapter.

Though you say you're taking a page from Du Bois, my impression from reading the previous chapter is that part of the problem with Du Bois' work is that we know his students contributed a lot but the nature of those contributions is totally lost to time (indeed, it took you some work to even recover their names from records).

So it feels to me like this chapter is trying to do better than Du Bois by specifically recording the names and contributions of the people who worked on this book. I think there could be a lot more to say about why you think that's important and what the implications of that choice are --- what is made different by this inclusion.

I'm not sure what I'm taking away from this paragraph, which reads as a list of pretty standard tools. What is the goal of foregrounding the specific tools?

One question I had: If the outcome is determined by manner of use rather than the specifics of the tools, then is it relevant what the tools are? Could different tools have been used to the same ends?

There's an article by Lisa Nakamura that defines "digital work" as "the work of the hand and its digits"