Search

In this article, we analyze historical, biographical, geolocational, and book distribution data from the *Shakespeare and Company Project* to understand Virginia Woolf’s readership in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The lending library cards from Sylvia Beach’s archive reveal the names of Woolf’s readers, and include important information about their reading habits and professional lives. The article uses a mixed-methods approach, combining historical and archival research on individual readers with visualizations of demographic, literary, and geographical data. Datasets from the *Shakespeare and Company Project* provide unique access to the networks of distribution, circulation, and readership that defined Woolf's literary presence in Paris. These networks, in turn, resonate with Woolf's own deep interest in her various readerships and publics.

Seeing is believing, so goes the cliché. In our extremely online world, the particular nexus between visual information and political belief has become one of the thorniest challenges to truth. We live in an extremely visual world in which we navigate social media, search engines, platforms, interfaces, icons, memes, and smartphones. Despite the fact that we navigate visual information at an astounding rate, we have not nationally developed literacies to debunk bad information. I argue that we are witnessing a confluence between extremely online, crowd-sourced conspiracies, whose adherents possess a high capacity for online information gathering, and visualization, meant to communicate data about our world effectively and accurately through optical means which has been co-opted for information warfare. Deploying such informatics further legitimates bizarre, unhinged theories about political reality. QAnon, the extremely online conspiracy theory that has cast its shadow over the Internet, relies exclusively on information visualization to communicate its message and is symptomatic of our inability to combat misinformation that mimics the methods of data analysis and information literacy. I argue that QAnon’s success—indeed, its very existence—relies on (at least) two principal factors: (1) QAnon relies, intentionally or no, on a slippage between data and information that obscures the interventions by Q and Q’s anons in leveraging information warfare, and (2) QAnon supports such a slippage with complex and interactive visualizations of bad information, thereby accelerating apophenia, the tendency to see linkages between random events and data points.