The week after eight people were killed in a string of mass shootings at Asian spas around Atlanta, I spoke to a group of college students about the year in data journalism, from Covid-19 trackers to US election results pages.

I told them that when talking about data visualisation, some of the most powerful graphics allow audiences to see themselves. But then I thought about how many times I made a chart of US racial data that either excluded Asians or relegated them to the “other” category.

“We’re missing from the history books; we’re also missing from the budget books,” Grace Meng, a New York congresswoman, said during a recent rally in Manhattan’s Chinatown, referring to America’s often forgotten history of anti-Asian violence and the disproportionately low amounts of philanthropic dollars going towards Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) causes. “We have been invisible for way too long.”