Chapter 2 - Data/Anecdote

Summary

How are we to make truthful statements, depictions or communications about a changing world? A fact is not an actuality but a statement about actuality; data are not given but captured and communicated; communication modifies the actuality it describes. We have many tools at our disposal – journalistic and essayistic, photographic, scientific – with which to name and depict things that are too big, too small, too fast or too slow for human perception. This chapter suggests that they share two fundamental procedures: abstraction and anecdote. The former culls large-scale dynamics from massive collections of data; the latter seizes on unique instances of the confluence of forces. Can an investigation of truth-practices in stories, reports, diagrams and images give us tools to redirect the changes we know we are experiencing but for which the means of expression seem suddenly ineffectual?