ResViz

Abstract

The use of data and metrics on a professional and personal level has led to considerable discourse around the performative power and politics of 'big data' and data visualization, with academia being no exception. We have developed a university system, ResViz, which publicly visualizes the externally funded research projects of academics, and their internal collaborations. We present an interview study that engages 20 key stakeholders, academics and administrators who are part of the pilot release for the first version of this system. In doing so, we describe and problematize our design space, considering the implications of making metrics visible and their social use within a large organization. Our findings cut across the way people communicate, review and manage performance with metrics. We raise seven design issues in this spacepractical considerations that expose the tensions in making metrics available for public contestation.

Everything We Do, Everything We Press

“…Early studies of workplace management established that surveillance and monitoring are central to the role of managers and supervisors [26], and practices (such as monitoring the time workers clock in and out, the quantity of their output, and setting goals for them to achieve) have been long-established measures of labor. Information technologies have also long been implicated in the measurement and monitoring of worker productivity: automating the logging time spent doing certain tasks [16], monitoring their locations [50] and collating and visualizing worker outputs for performance review [23].…”

“…Workplace monitoring can also impact morale [41], perception of workloads [5], and relations between staff and managers [64]. They can also raise concerns over the decontextualized and depersonalized nature of data gathered for the purposes of monitoring [40,62,70], and its value or fairness as a measure of performance and success of an individual [23]. Furthermore, as interactions between workers and management get mediated by data, pre-existing tensions or misunderstandings can be intensified [61].…”

Accountability Work

“…This includes data visualisations and interactions with data supporting personal goals, individual reflection, and shared awareness in social networks. At an organisational level, studies have demonstrated how charities have used open data to form narratives around local conditions [9], while others have highlighted how visualisations around organisational metrics (including funding) support the use of data for reporting, understanding, and providing insight within highly politicised environments [8]. In the personal sphere, concepts of data lockers allow external processors to interact with one's data while maintaining personal control [29] and data itself is likened to a boundary object forming part of the infrastructure of everyday life [40,3].…”

“…The work reported in this paper builds upon previous research in HCI around the design of systems to facilitate transparency and accountability in charities [27], and work that discusses the use of data for interaction by and between individuals and organisations [3,8]. Where previous investigations focus on the design for interfaces to interact with data, or the ownership and processing of the same, it typically fails to account for the work needed in organisations to compile this data in the first place.…”

“…Modern technologies that enable large scale production and consumption of data play an increasingly important role in mediating transparency for organisations by supporting the online reporting and publishing of financial data [30], while the production of open data is widely claimed to be synonymous with transparency in dialogues around government and business [2,14,15]. Recent work within HCI has examined the use of open data by charities for constructing narratives [9], the use of data for metrics for reporting and understanding organisational finances [8], and has provided insight into how digital systems can provide more comprehensive forms of transparency in these organisations [27]. However, thus far there is little understanding of how technologies like these, and more commonplace data technologies, and data work, integrate into the daily, lived, work of charities.…”