This paper highlights the role that emotions play in engagements with data and their visualisation. To date, the relationship between data and emotions has rarely been noted, in part because data studies have not attended to everyday engagements with data. We draw on an empirical study to show a wide range of emotional engagements with diverse aspects of data and their visualisation, and so demonstrate the importance of emotions as vital components of making sense of data. We nuance the argument that regimes of datafication, in which numbers, metrics and statistics dominate, are characterised by a renewed faith in objectivity and rationality, arguing that in datafied times, it is not only numbers but also the feeling of numbers that is important. We build on the sociology of a) emotions and b) the everyday to do this, and in so doing, we contribute to the development of a sociology of data. 2.
This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers' belief that through visualisation, it is possible to 'do good with data' (Periscopic, 2014). We focus on four conventions which imbue visualisations with a sense of objectivity, transparency and facticity. These include: a) two-dimensional viewpoints; b) clean layouts; c) geometric shapes and lines; d) the inclusion of data sources. We argue that thinking about visualisations from a social semiotic standpoint, as we do in this paper by bringing together what visualisation designers say about their intentions with a semiotic analysis of the visualisations they produce, advances understanding of the ways that data visualisations come into being, how they are imbued with particular qualities and how power operates in and through them. Thus this paper contributes nuanced understanding of data visualisations and their production, by uncovering the ways in which power is at work within them. In turn, it advances debate about data in society and the emerging field of data studies.
New methods to analyse social media data provide a powerful way to know publics and capture what they say and do. At the same time, access to these methods is uneven, with corporations and governments tending to have best access to relevant data and analytics tools. Critics raise a number of concerns about the implications dominant uses of data mining and analytics may have for the public: they result in less privacy, more surveillance and social discrimination, and they provide new ways of controlling how publics come to be represented and so understood. In this paper, we consider if a different relationship between the public and data mining might be established, one in which publics might be said to have greater agency and reflexivity vis-à-vis data power. Drawing on growing calls for alternative data regimes and practices, we argue that to enable this different relationship, data mining and analytics need to be democratised in three ways: they should be subject to greater public supervision and regulation, available and accessible to all, and used to create not simply known but reflexive, active and knowing publics. We therefore imagine conditions in which data mining is not just used as a way to know publics, but can become a means for publics to know themselves.
This introduction to the special issue on data and agency argues that datafication should not only be understood as the process of collecting and analysing data about Internet users, but also as feeding such data back to users, enabling them to orient themselves in the world. It is important that debates about data power recognise that data is also generated, collected and analysed by alternative actors, enhancing rather than undermining the agency of the public. Developing this argument, we first make clear why and how the question of agency should be central to our engagement with data. Subsequently, we discuss how this question has been operationalized in the five contributions to this special issue, which empirically open up the study of alternative forms of datafication. Building on these contributions, we conclude that as data acquire new power, it is vital to explore the space for citizen agency in relation to data structures and to examine the practices of data work, as well as the people involved in these practices.
As data become more and more ubiquitous, so too do data visualizations, which increasingly circulate online and are an important means through which non-experts get access to data. This paper addresses the factors that affect how people engage with data visualizations, a relatively underresearched focus in visualization research to date. Drawing on qualitative, empirical research with users, we identify six factors that affect engagement: subject matter; source/media location; beliefs and opinions; time; emotions; and confidence and skills. In drawing attention to these factors, we bring HCI concerns together with approaches to media audience research, to identify new themes for visualization research. In particular, we argue that our findings have implications for how effectiveness is conceived and defined in relation to data visualizations and how this varies depending on how, by whom, where and for what purpose visualizations are encountered. Our paper aims to extend the horizons of visualization research, in its focus on factors that affect engagement and how these suggest new definitions of effectiveness. Contents Introduction Research into engagements with visualizations Methodology Factors which affect engagements with visualizations Implications of findings for definitions of effectiveness Conclusion IntroductionAs data become increasingly ubiquitous (Kitchin, 2014;Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013), so do data visualizations -that is, the visual representation of data and datasets which communicates precise information and values. Indeed, the main way that 'ordinary,' non-experts access newly ubiquitous data is through visualizations, as Gitelman and Jackson note when they claim that data are 'mobilized graphically' [1]. It is important, therefore, to consider data visualizations as objects for critical scrutiny, not just as mechanisms to communicate data [2]. We do this in this paper by focusing on the question of how people engage with data visualizations. By 'engage', we refer to the processes of looking, reading, interpreting and thinking that take place when people cast their eyes on data visualisations and try to make sense of them. We propose that research about visualization engagement can learn from some of the approaches that are widely used in media and communication studies, especially in relation to audience research and their attention to factors (such as class, gender, race, age, location, political outlook, and education of audience members) which affect engagement with media and communications artefacts. Importantly, these factors extend beyond textual and technical matters. In data and information visualisation research, studies exploring the effectiveness of visualizations tend to define effectiveness quite narrowly, if at all, measuring it, for example, through accuracy, consistency or speed of comprehension. On the whole, such studies provide little information about who users are and how this might affect their engagement with visualizations. Also, they almost never consider the f...
This paper reports on an action research project with public sector organisations in the UK which experimented with a range of digital methods (social media data mining, social network and issue network mapping, data visualisation), in order to explore their potential usefulness for the public engagement activities of these organisations. We argue that there is a need for small-scale, qualitative studies of cultures of large-scale, quantitative data like ours, to open up spaces in which to reflect critically on the methods with which such data is produced. However, in the paper we highlight the difficulties we had enacting through action research a commitment to both the potential (which might be seen as the action part of action research) and the problems (which might be seen as the research part of action research) of digital methods. Following Hammersley (2002), we suggest that an equal balance between action and research may always be difficult to sustain, in both action research and the use of digital methods. Despite this, we argue that critical discussion of digital methods needs to extend beyond academic spacesthrough this move, we suggest, we might open up a space in which to reflect on how these methods might be used for the public good.
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