ARTS1092: Working With Data
Week 5: Working with Data – Representing, Rendering,
Narrativising
Dr Andrew Brooks
[email protected]
I would like to give my respect to the Bedegal and Wangal peoples, the traditional custodians of the land I live and
work, today, whose sovereignty was never ceded to the British Crown. I wish to pay my respects to the Elders past,
present, and future. I acknowledge that this site has long been a place of teaching, learning, sharing, and creativity.
Always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
Storytelling, Context, Communication
Information (visualisation) overload?
Do we need different approaches to rendering
that contain clues about the conditions under
which both the data and the rendering was
produced? Do we need to develop approaches
to rendering that question, intervene in, and
create new relations to data?
Jonah M. Kessel and Hiroko Tabuchi, ‘It’s a Vast, Invisible Climate Meance. We Made It Visible’,
NY Times, Nov. 8, 2019.
At every stage of the process of working with data, we must ‘cook’ the data with care.
Context Matters (getting meta on your data)
Metadata (that is data about the data) is crucial to understanding data.
Some contextual factors to consider in understanding are:
• Who: we must consider who collected the data and situate the data
collector in relation to social, political, historical, economic factors.
• How: It is important to know how the data was collected and
generated.
• What: It is crucial to know what the data is about before you render
it. This could include reading books, papers, and studies; talking to
experts; studying accompanying documentation; considering the
contingencies; structuring/analysing the data yourself.
• When: Things change over time so the historical and temporal
contexts of data sets are crucial to consider. You need to understand
when the data was collected and what span of time it covers.
Context Matters (getting meta on your data)
• Where: Just as things change over time so do things differ in
different locations. We must consider where the data was
collected.
• How much: The size of the data set is another important
factor and changes the assumptions we can make.
• Why: It’s important to consider why the data was collected
in the first place. As we talked about in week one, data is
rhetorical and so can be used to serve certain agendas
(whether corporate, governmental, activist or something
else).
You really can’t know too much about the data you are working
with! Try to learn as much as you can – use your skills as
researchers to investigate and contextualise the data you are
working with before you begin rendering it.
Data stories and audiences
Audience
In thinking about your audience and
communication objective, you might ask
the following questions (based Susan
O’Halloran’s ‘Think, Feel, Do’ activity):
1. What do you want the audience to
think, feel, or do?
2. Thinking backwards from this objective:
what do you need to show the
audience? What aspects of the data and
what relations within the data does the
audience need to receive and
understand?
Storytelling
Andrew Brooks and Katelyn Toth-
Fejel, The Journey of Jeans (2015)
takes a storytelling approach to the
data visualisation.
Storytelling
An analysis of possible audiences for the
Journey of Jeans data rendering.
Mark Lombardi, Oliver North, Lake Resources of Panama, and the Iran-Contra
OperaAon, ca. 1984-86 (fourth version), 1999.
Core principles for (feminist) data rendering
Summary of D’Ignazio and Klein’s ‘Core Principles of Feminist Data,
in Feigenbaum and Alamalhodaei The Data Storytelling Workbook
Choosing the right approach to rendering
Some questions to orient yourself:
1. What kind of data are you working with?
2. How big is the data set?
3. Are you trying to show patterns/relations within the data? Or are
you trying to the show the data as part of a network of
processes, systems, and infrastructures?
4. How are you dealing with the context and metadata?
5. Who is the intended audience?
6. How do you want the data to be perceived?
Case studies:
Mahwish Chisty, Škart Collective, Clement Valla
Mahwish Chisty
L: Mahwish Chisty, Naming the Dead (2018); R: Mahwish Chisty, ‘Predator’: Drone Shadow (2016)
Škart Collective: Collaborative mapping
Đorđe Balmazović (Škart Collective) in collaboration with refugees
in Koviljača refugee camp in Serbia
Clement Valla, Postcards from Google Earth, 2010-ongoing.
Clement Valla, Postcards from Google Earth, 2010-ongoing.
