Data visualization can make information more memorable, make it more persuasive, facilitate understanding and ultimately motivate action. And within human rights research, it can help investigators and researchers draw a bigger picture from individual human rights abuses by allowing them to identify patterns that may suggest the existence of abusive policies, unlawful orders, negligence, or other forms of culpable action or inaction by decision-makers.
The purpose of this activity is to explore some of the ideas and principles around designing effective data visualization for human rights advocacy.
This activity is broken into a series of six topics. In practice not every visualization process follows these exact steps in this same order. However, for a workshop setting, we present these as a way to walk through the topics. Each topic has a corresponding list of options and choices. Read through each topic and follow the instructions. Explore the options for each step as you progress.
The six steps are: