STITCHING THE CURVE: PANDEMIC CRAFT AND FEMINIST DATA VISUALIZATION

Feminist scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the ways “bigdata” and data representations reinscribe gender and racial inequality, an issue made evenmore pressing by the role data has taken in our daily lives since the start of the COVID-19pandemic. "Stitching the Curve," a knitted pandemic data visualization project by librariansat the University of Alberta, offers an intersection between digital activism andcraftivism, enabling a material, feminist response to an erasure and minimization ofcollective loss. We examine the media coverage around the project, which includes the onlineblogs of the project’s participants. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA)as a guiding methodology, we consider simultaneously the feminist, activist framing and theinfluence of material and digital platforms on the cultural influence of the work (Brock2018). Blogging and knitting are frequently associated with craft and writing as anexpression of the domestic and personal, relegated to a feminine and, consequently,minimized space of care and labor. Through a critical technocultural discourse analysis ofStitching the Curve, we understand how the project makes a powerful statement inrepresenting not only the oft-dismissed human cost of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also usesmediums of representation that challenge patriarchal “big data” collection andrepresentational practices. Stitching the Curve makes data visualization a rhetoric ofcare.