I had the privilege of interviewing scholar Theodore Porter, who writes about the origins and political implications of statistics and the “pursuit of objectivity” in Western society over the modern era. Billed as “a conversation about the uses and abuses of big data, and the fantasy of statisticians as a beneficent elite”, the project presented an opportunity to synthesize my research into the human side of quantitative methodology as it collides with visual culture, undertaken while I was professionally focused on data visualization.