my new book about absent data — is out now.
Absent Data. Why Gaps, Uncertainty, and Invisible Data Matter. (Wiley, 2027)
by Tiziana Alocci
With foreword by Stefanie Posavec and featuring an interview with Paolo Ciuccarelli.
Absent Data: Why Gaps, Uncertainty, and Invisible Data Matter reframes a persistent challenge for data visualisation practitioners. Rather than treating incomplete datasets, absence of data, and unexplained gaps as obstacles to clean away, this book presents methodologies for making absence itself meaningful and visible within data-driven narratives.
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Bring Absent Data into the classroom
The book has been written as a resource for teaching critical data thinking across design, data visualisation, journalism, artistic research and related disciplines.
Universities adopting the book for a course can complement it with a live online guest lecture (45–60 minutes), giving students the opportunity to discuss the ideas directly with the author.
Teaching resources and course adoption support are also available.
Get in touch → hello@tizianaalocci.com
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Turn a keynote into a shared reading experience
For conferences interested in extending the conversation beyond the stage, speaking engagements can be combined with bulk book orders for attendees.
This approach allows participants to continue exploring the ideas after the event.
Custom speaking and book packages are available for conferences of all sizes.
Get in touch → hello@tizianaalocci.com
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Absent Data provides practical frameworks for working with uncertainty, invisible information and complex systems.
Organisations can combine workshops or keynote talks with copies of the book, allowing participants to continue learning after the session and creating a shared foundation for future discussions.
Each engagement is tailored to the organisation's goals, audience and learning objectives.
Get in touch → hello@tizianaalocci.com
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Extend the impact of your programme
If you're planning a grant-funded project, public engagement programme or educational initiative, I'd be happy to explore how Absent Data can become part of the experience through bespoke speaking engagements, discussions or book-supported programmes.
Get in touch → hello@tizianaalocci.com
If you're interested in course adoption, conference packages, workshops or collaborative opportunities, I'd love to hear more about your project.
Get in touch → hello@tizianaalocci.com
why absent data?
Absence has been a constant presence throughout my life. The absence of persons, experiences, skills, information, and answers. Those gaps, voids, invisibility, and silences could have defined me in limiting ways. Instead, they became one of my greatest strengths.
The book offers creative approaches to noticing uncertainty and ambiguity and working with data sets that do not exist yet, by moving beyond standard imputation techniques to design visualisations where what is missing carries as much weight as what is present.
You will also find:
Methodologies for dealing with data visualisations that represent incomplete, or nontraditional data in meaningful and deliberate ways.
Approaches to data-driven storytelling that treat uncertainty and ambiguity as signals rather than noise to eliminate.
Creative frameworks for communicating what is not present in a dataset through hands-on activities.
A diagram mapping three distinct forms of absence: Invisible Data, Blurred Data, and Data Erasure. Where invisibility meets uncertainty, data becomes neglected or ephemeral. Where invisibility meets erasure, data becomes obscure or forgotten. Where uncertainty meets erasure, data becomes probabilistic or redacted.
WANT TO WRITE ABOUT THE BOOK?
If you’re a journalist looking to write about the book, request a review copy, interview, or tailored briefing. I can provide press materials, high-resolution images, and expert commentary to support your story.
Get in touch with your deadline and angle: press@tizianaalocci.com
Review Copies, Interviews, and Expert Commentary
