Rancière

In this short book, just 64 pages, Clare Birchall addresses the shifting relationships between data and citizens to unpack what big data, transparency and openness, mean for democracy and the government of subjects. It stands as an interesting read alongside Zuboff’s (2019) voluminous The age of surveillance capitalism, not only for the contrast in page count, but also for the distinct theoretical take and the greater focus on the role of the State.

Introduction

This paper concerns diagrams and diagrammatic praxis. Diagrams are visual information devices that broadly comprise a range of technical genres including graphs, technical drawings and charts. These can be characterised further as visual displays or symbolic representations of qualitative information, often employing shapes connected by lines, arrows, or other visual links to present or communicate relations and ideas. In our daily lives we encounter diagrams in the form of maps, line graphs, bar charts, engineering blueprints, and architects’ sketches.