To not recognize this work, this labour is an exercise of privilege and power.
This means I must acknowledge the unseen labor that supports my work. I will give formal credit to the developers of all the open-source tools in my project's final acknowledgements.
The current digital ecosystem requires that people’s behaviour online (their clicks, their likes, their follows, their browsing) by monetized (and weaponized).
When gathering source material online, I must be critical/review any data or image found on sites designed purely to make money, ensuring my research is based on neutral, scholarly sources.
The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures.
This reminds me that my final map as well as any other visual media I create must tell a story of scholarly discovery (ex. Acknowledging how religion affected survival rates). I must not only gather facts that look pretty on the final project map.
Excel is a black box. When we use it, we have to take on faith that its statistics do what they say they are doing.
Just as people mistrusted hidden power in the medieval period, I must avoid any closed software when analyzing my historical data. I will use open-source programs (like R, QGIS, or simple text editing) to clean and process my data so the exact transformation steps are completely visible and not hidden inside a "black box".
The principles that we should follow are: make the data and the methods that generated the results openly available script the stastical analysis (that is, no more point-and-click statistics). More on this below. use version control
This is like keeping a public, perfect record of a medieval financial ledger. When I gather my Black Death data, I must immediately put it into a system (like GitHub) that records every change, so I can always prove where my facts came from and how I used them.
Further Reading For a great workflow using KoBoToolbox, QGIS, PostGIS, and LibreOffice Base (all free and open source tools), see this overview from Ben Carter.
For more information on QGIS/PostGIS etc.