This beautiful SVG landscape…
… is a visualisation of everyone who committed suicide in the Netherlands in 2017.
Created by Sonja Kuijpers of Studio Terp and published last week, the project is called ‘A view on despair’. It was precipitated in part by Kuijpers’ own battle with depression. Have a look at the image again in that light:
The landscape elements themselves represent the methods people used (for example buildings are jumping from a height, waves are drowning, and trees are hanging). Differences in height or size of the elements represent age differences. You can see the full legend and data behind the visualisation at Studio Terp.
Part of the impact of this image comes from the tension between its literal content (a beautiful landscape) and the data behind it (suicide rates). What appears at first to be a beautiful landscape seems suddenly lonely and devoid of people once we know the meaning behind it. With each part of the landscape representing a person, it’s as if the scene is inhabited by ghosts, the spirits of the departed who have re-entered the inanimate world and the earth they were built from. There are more literal elements in there (waves and drowning, for example), but overall the connection between the lonely empty landscape and national suicides works on a metaphorical level.
Data visualisation is fundamentally metaphorical. We make connections between unlike but related things, like “The height of a bar is like an amount of money”, or “the volume of a circle is like the number of people in a country”. In a way it’s like poetry, or language itself. Some metaphors seem so natural that we don’t even recognise them as metaphors. When someone says they have “stacks of money”, we don’t immediately imagine that they have their banknotes piled up in teetering columns somewhere. That’s a bit like a bar chart. We’re so used to thinking “height of rectangle = abstract amount” that it seems more like science than the poetry that it is.
Some metaphors are less conventional though, and more tenuous. When Emily Dickinson writes:
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.”
We recognise that as a metaphor immediately. ‘Bird of hope’ is not as conventional a metaphor as ’stacks of money’. Some data visualisations, like that of Kuijpers, fit into this category as well. Not because they’re fundamentally different in kind to bar charts or bubble charts (all are metaphorical), but because the metaphor is a bit more unusual or creative, so their metaphorical nature is more obvious.
Like language, when we want to be very clear and precise, we use a conventional metaphor. We say that our bank balance is ‘high’ (even that is metaphorical, unless your bank keeps stacked hard currency for you). On the other hand if we want to make an emotional impact, we use an unconventional metaphor.
Seeing Kuijpers’ work, I’m reminded of the famous page in John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’, where we’re shown “a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it”, and then told on the other side of the page “This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself”. (thanks to Hyperallergic for the GIF).
The whole mood of the scene changes once we know the information behind it.
Van Gogh’s art never had much success in his own lifetime, but it’s now acknowledged as the work of genius. So to anyone who’s read up to here: However the world is currently treating you, I hope Emily Dickinson’s bird of hope perches in your soul this week.
If you or anyone you know needs help:
International:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List of suicide crisis lines
Australia:
- Lifeline on 13 11 14
- Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
- MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978
- Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467
- Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36
- Headspace on 1800 650 890
- ReachOut at au.reachout.com
Like Sonja’s work? She’s currently looking for clients, so get in touch.
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