The contributors collectively challenge the notion that data visualization is ever neutral or purely aesthetic. Instead, they position it as a practice deeply embedded in power relations, cultural narratives, and ethical responsibilities. This framework is highly relevant to my project, which involves visualizing data from Phalaenopsis orchid growth in Taiwan as a way to engage critically with the island’s colonial history, environmental politics, and multispecies entanglements. There are some key concepts and insights:

1. Visualization Is Not Neutral
   Hall and Dávila argue that every act of visualization involves decisions about what to include, what to omit, and how to represent. Even seemingly objective diagrams are shaped by the biases of those who collect, structure, and read the data. “Visualizations always reflect the priorities, politics, and limitations of the people and systems that produce them.” (Hall & Dávila, 2013, p.11) This reminds me that in visualizing orchid environmental data, growth cycles, and bioelectric signals, I am not merely displaying a natural process. I am reconstructing the orchid as a subject of knowledge. This process may reproduce colonial logics of classification, or it may open up a decolonial narrative strategy.

1. Data Is Entwined with Cultural Context
   The authors emphasize the importance of data visualization within its cultural and political context. Data should not be treated as raw, objective material, but rather as constructed and mediated through systems of meaning. “We should not treat data as raw, but always consider it as cooked—processed, prepared, and framed.” (p.13) This point is particularly important to my research. As a key plant in Taiwan's colonial history, the collection and presentation of data related to orchids has never been neutral. From botanical classification and collection practices during the Japanese colonial period to today’s commercial greenhouse production, every piece of data carries political and economic intent. The visualization experiments I conduct are not just representations of data but acts of reinterpretation and questioning of these embedded processes.
    

2. Visualization as a Tool for Critical Intervention
   The book highlights the potential of visualization not only as a tool for knowledge dissemination, but as a space for critical engagement. Visualization can reveal power structures, amplify marginalized voices, and rethink the relationship between data and its audience. “Critical visualization practices encourage viewers to question not only the data but the systems that produce and interpret it.” (p.15) In my research, I use sensory devices to make the orchid’s physiological responses part of a visual and sonic experience. This invites viewers to reconsider the questions: Who is speaking? Who is being heard? Who or what is the subject of data? Through this method, the orchid is no longer a passive specimen but becomes an active, living participant.

Through the lens of Critical Visualization, I can more deeply reflect on the ethical and political dimensions of data visualization. It provides a compelling theoretical grounding for my exploration of orchid data as a medium for decolonial storytelling. My project does not aim to build a more elegant botanical database. Rather, it uses data visualization as a method to challenge the colonial legacies embedded in the orchid’s historical and contemporary representations, and to open new perceptual paths between plants and people, between past and present, between ecology and politics.

Data is not neutral, and visualization is not harmless. This book offers me a theoretical foundation that allows my work to become a poetic and critical practice that uses image, sound, and interaction to pose new questions about knowledge, life, and history.