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Touching Variables: Decolonial Approaches and New Tools for Ecological Data Visualization Abstract

This article activates decolonial feminist art history as a transdisciplinary protocol for organizing quantitative data. While data science has historically prioritized Cartesian or Euclidean geometry as the most efficient tools for data visualization, we instead draw on Indigenous calculation tools and on epistemic relationships to land that are “made pre-modern and backward, [m]ade savage” in the settler-colonial academic system, but which allow for more visual and semantic flexibility than the x-y axis. In foregrounding pre-Columbian calculation tools as the basis for a new data visualization method, we present questions about how scientists might negotiate multiple interrelated variables in their research – thus opening more possibilities for narrating complex causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change and facilitating discussions about the relationship between climate change and settler-colonialism through visual means.

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