Feminist scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the ways “big
data” and data representations reinscribe gender and racial inequality, an issue made even
more pressing by the role data has taken in our daily lives since the start of the COVID-19
pandemic. "Stitching the Curve," a knitted pandemic data visualization project by librarians
at the University of Alberta, offers an intersection between digital activism and
craftivism, enabling a material, feminist response to an erasure and minimization of
collective loss. We examine the media coverage around the project, which includes the online
blogs of the project’s participants. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA)
as a guiding methodology, we consider simultaneously the feminist, activist framing and the
influence of material and digital platforms on the cultural influence of the work (Brock
2018). Blogging and knitting are frequently associated with craft and writing as an
expression of the domestic and personal, relegated to a feminine and, consequently,
minimized space of care and labor. Through a critical technocultural discourse analysis of
Stitching the Curve, we understand how the project makes a powerful statement in
representing not only the oft-dismissed human cost of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also uses
mediums of representation that challenge patriarchal “big data” collection and
representational practices. Stitching the Curve makes data visualization a rhetoric of
care
