Seeing the Unseen

As D’Ignazio and Klein (2020) argue in Data Feminism, the exclusion of women and marginalised groups from historical datasets is not incidental—it is structural, embedded within systems that prioritise the quantifiable and the powerful. This exclusion constitutes a form of symbolic violence, where absence is not just a gap but an expression of what society deems unworthy of recording. In line with Crenshaw’s (1989) theory of intersectionality, such erasures are not singular, but multiply layered, disproportionately affecting those at the intersections of gender, race, class, and migration status.

Fickers (2021) furthers this critique by conceptualising digital archives not as neutral restorations, but as procedural artefacts—assemblages shaped by contemporary logics, technologies, and epistemologies. Visualising data is thus not a passive act; it is a form of critical authorship. Our use of timelines, maps, and voiceovers becomes a counter-archival strategy that not only reveals inherited silences, but actively reinscribes memory into the digital record (Koenen et al., 2021).

This is where the figure of Mary gains epistemological weight. As Dourish and Gómez Cruz (2018) argue in Datafication and Data Fiction, data not only reflects but constructs reality—often in speculative, partial, or exclusionary ways. Mary, as a fictional but plausible Quarry Hill resident, becomes a symbolic counterweight to these exclusions. Her voice illustrates how the unseen can be made audible, not despite her archival absence, but because of it. Her existence challenges the assumption that what is not counted does not count—and insists that even fictional presence can reveal truths about systemic absence.

Finally, the metrics and visualisations often taken as objective truths are themselves semiotic constructsas(Baym, 2013). What we choose to visualise and how does not simply display knowledge—it shapes it. Mary’s voiceless image becomes a deliberate refusal to comply with this logic and a feminist statement against the data aesthetic regime that equates visibility with validity.