Rethinking 'big data' as visual knowledge: the sublime and the diagrammatic in data visualisation

Informational data, we are told, are proliferating ever more rapidly and with increasing complexity. In an age of 'big data' we are seeing a broad reaching, and often uncritical fascination with data visualisation and its potential for knowledge generation. At its extreme this represents a fantasy of knowing, or total knowledge. Nonetheless, for those working in visual anthropology, big data and data visualisation offer significant extensions to our ways of knowing and our categories of knowledge. In this article we probe the fascination and potential of data visualisation and its relevance for understanding human experience, social relations and networks. First, we argue that the celebration of informational aesthetics can be understood as a version of the Kantian mathematical sublime. Extending this analysis, we argue that productive possibilities for thinking about data visualisation are to be found in Deleuze's engagement with the diagram. The diagram, for Deleuze, does not represent but rather operates both as expression and problem resolution. It is incomplete in the dual sense of never capturing the totality of the object and in its dynamism. This approach points to the merits of this investment in data visualisation (the way it works as expression and problem resolution), but highlights the need to be cautious about fetishising the sublimity of 'beautiful data'.