Are We Drowning in Data or Swimming in it?

Lets talk about data for a second. No, not just boring spreadsheets and pie charts (though, no shade if that's your thing). I mean data as in everything and anything digital: tweets, news broadcasts, selfies, cat videos. Basically, if it exists online, its data.

By: Avgrace

Figure 1. A digital mosaic portrait of a man composed entirely of colourful numbers and text, forming his face and background in a gradient of purples, oranges, and yellows.

Lisa R. Johnston's Intro to Data Curation got me thinking: we live in time where data is less like a resource and more like an uncontrollable flood. Johnston even calls it "the coin of the digital realm". Except this currency isn't in short supply, it's actually multiplying constantly, probably faster then we can comprehend. Our instagram likes, Google searches, even checking the weather app to see if it's finally warm enough to ditch the jacket (it is!), that's all part of this endless flow of information.

But here's the catch: if we are all swimming in this sea of data, who's making sure we don"t drown?

That's where data curation swoops in, like a lifeguard for your information, literally. Johnston paints curators as the ones organizing, preserving, and (most importantly) giving meaning to the chaos. Without curators, all this digital "stuff" could easily become junk, unusable, forgotten, lost in the void of dead links and outdated formats.

Lets look at Marion Stokes from Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, this woman was basically curating media before data curation was even a term. She recorded 24 hour news cycles for decades, obsessively archiving what we'd now call a mountain of data. At first glance, it looks like an overwhelming mess of VHS tapes. But when you step back, it's clear that she created a visual history of media, race, politics, and power. A curated archive revealing patterns we might've missed in real time.

Figure 2. An illustration of three hikers climbing stylized, colourful mountains overlaid with grid lines and data points, set against a vibrant orange sky.

And now, fast forward to today: our data isn't on clunky tapes, it's floating in the cloud, sitting in massive repositories. But the questions remain: who gets to control it? Who decides what's worth saving? And possibly most importantly, how do we make sure it stays accessible for the future?

Visual culture, the lens we've been conditioned to use (what we've discussed in class), really helps here. Because data isn't just numbers - it's images, sounds, texts, memes, movements. It shapes and reflects who we are. Through a visual culture perspective, we see how digital databases like the Cyberfeminism Index or Cite Black Women+ Bibliography aren't neutral collections. They're activist tools. They challenge the dominant narratives by spotlighting underrepresented voices.

That's the cool (terrifying) part: the way data moves, who stores it, and how it's interpreted can either reinforce existing power structures or subvert them entirely. It's easy to feel powerless in the face of so much content. But learning about data curation reminds us that there are in fact ways to stay afloat. Ways to organize the chaos, to use the flood to build something meaningful.

So, are we drowning in data? Probably. But with the right tools, and some smart curators steering the ship, maybe we're actually learning to swim.