Visualizing Palestine

Visualizing Palestine describes what it does in a single sentence: it uses data and research to visually communicate Palestinian experiences in order to provoke narrative change. That is a design brief rather than an archival one, and the organisation is candid that its object is argument. Its own analysis of why the work is necessary is that the basic facts and root causes of the Palestinian struggle are already well documented but are “frequently denied or obscured by those shielding Israel from accountability” — so the gap it targets is not evidence but legibility.

For a researcher the useful part is the library. The graphics are built on published data and released free for individuals and movement organisations to use, which makes them among the most widely circulated visual representations of Palestinian conditions anywhere — and, because each is built from cited sources, they double as a fast index to the underlying studies. The organisation publishes its method as a cycle of research and monitoring, story conceptualisation, design and outreach, which is unusual transparency for advocacy design and makes the graphics auditable in a way that most infographics are not.

Its most substantial research artefact is not a graphic at all. Palestine Open Maps, the platform that stitched the British Mandate Survey of Palestine sheets into navigable layers and joined them to population data for over two thousand places, was initiated at an Impact Data Lab workshop that Visualizing Palestine organised with Columbia University Studio-X Amman in March 2018, and is developed by Visualizing Palestine. Anyone using the maps is using this organisation’s infrastructure.

Two caveats worth stating plainly. This is an advocacy organisation and says so — it frames its work in terms of liberation, solidarity and sumud, and it does not present itself as neutral. And a graphic is a compression: the honest use of the library is to take the visual as a pointer and cite the source underneath it, which Visualizing Palestine makes possible by publishing those sources. Used that way it is one of the most efficient entry points into the quantitative literature on Palestine that exists.

Sources

• About us — Visualizing Palestine
• About — Palestine Open Maps (project credits)