This paper offers an empirical example on how diverse national and international organisations and actors are ‘drawn together’ (Latour 1986) in the production, representation and usage of statistics. In this paper, we explore the interplay of numbers, images, actors and devices that are linked together via the work of the Swedish foundation Gapminder. Gapminder is based on the work of late professor Hans Rosling and his influential pedagogical visualisation of data. Using statistics from for instance the United Nations, the World Bank and national databases, the foundation intends to fight “devastating misconceptions about global development” by for instance producing teaching resources “based on reliable statistics” (Gapminder 2019). The foundation is connected to several private businesses as well as national and international agencies. Its collaborators include for instance funders (such as IKEA and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation), universities, the UN, as well as NGOs, and aims to target both the work of global organisations and the mindsets of individual students and teachers across the globe. To explore this interplay empirically, we draw on website materials such as presentations, texts, talks and animations, as well as media materials and annual public and financial accounts from the foundation. Gapminder’s strategy is to link visual interactive design to existing data. It aims to set data free and “get it out in the world” (Rosling, 2006) thus offering a solution to problems of data sharing and co-development. Visualisation takes on a particular form of encoding (Freeman & Sturdy 2014) in the shape of a ‘participatory’ inscription device (Latour & Woolgar 1986) based on user collaboration and co-production. Such devices work in forceful ways by offering a “unique advantage (…) [in a] rhetorical or polemical situation. “You doubt of what I say? I’ll show you” (Latour 1986: 13). We discuss visualisation in terms of visualism (Fabian 2002) and objectivism (Bourdieu 1977). Gapminder, we argue, Illustrates the continuous modernist search for knowledge as a universal solvent to human challenges. Gapminder promotes an ambitious educational aim and facilitates organisational interplay in particular ways by connecting public and private actors with global as well as local foci, targeting the World Bank as well as classrooms. By its work with data visualisation, it transmutes baser data into statistical gold – performing what has been described as a “magical alchemy” (The Guardian 2017) with numbers and images, enabled by and opening up for different forms of organisational interplay.

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