To tell a data story, one must have access to the data, tools, and skills necessary to share the information. These limitations are not the only ones which can have an impact. Every decision--from data set, to chart type, to design, to where the story is shared---can affect the ability of an audience to engage with the conversation. Audiences are not a one-size-fits-all crowd, either.
How do we increase equity with our data conversations? What are our powers and responsibilities to make that happen?
Students in Civic Art & Design Studio (IN123), with professor Catherine DʼIgnazio, visualized 100 of the more than 6,000 citizen questions collected by the City of Boston as part of the GoBoston 2030 transportation planning process. This video is realized as a large, projected public art installation. Are you interested in making your own gifs? There are lots of great resources on the web. Check out the repo on making data-related animated gifs from Lena Groeger of ProPublica.
The Quantified Selfie publishes stories that explore "identity through data." What does our inbox, our music choices, or our online community say about us? Trina Chiasson spoke about a related topic in this 2016 Tapestry short story, The Rise of the Data Selfie.
Andy Kirk looks at the success of "participative" visualizations. Lots of great links here to online data stories that engage in audience to find themselves in the data.
How do we develop more pluralistic data designs---ones which are inclusive of ideas from the full spectrum of genders, races, and cultures? What is the history of this work? Check out how W.E.B. DuBois represented African-American life in 1900, Florence Nightingale, or the work of Elizabeth Peabody shared by Lauren Klein.
We can use our stories to recover unusual histories. At the 2016 Eyeo conference, Sara Hendren talks about "design for Know-Nothings, Dilettantes, and Melancholy Interlopers – Translators, impresarios, believers, and the heartbroken—this is a talk about design outside of authorship and ownership, IP or copyright, and even outside of research and collaboration. When and where do ideas come to life? What counts as design?"
All work with data---from the labels we choose to the charts we design---has potential inequitable impacts. Lena Groeger writes about some of these in Forms Matter: how the design of forms can decide an election, affect racial profiling & shape identity.
Lauren Klein has written about visualization as argument. You may also be interested in her presentation on feminist data visualization or view all of her projects.
From 2009, a paper-based visualization competition. How can we make data more experiential?
Lena Groeger of ProPublica reminds us that "The data doesn't speak for itself---it echoes its collectors." Watch her 2017 Tapestry presentation on When the storyteller shows up in the story to think more about how various biases show up in the visuals we produce.
Learn more about responsible data use, including the series of forums where various handbooks have been developed to support this work on a larger scale.
What do we do about missing data...and why is it missing in the first place?
- Mimi Onuoha has started a repo to explore this topic.
- At the 2016 Tapestry Conference, Eva Galanes-Rosenbaum shared that the plural of anecdote is not "data"...except when it is as a way to show how we can mitigate the effects of missing data.
- You may also be interested in this recent post on four methods to deal with missing data.
- Nathan Yau has also written about strategies to use when visualizing incomplete or missing data sets.
- More importantly, what are we saying when our choice is not to include particular data? Watch the 2016 Eyeo presentation, Setting Tangents around a Circle, from Josh Begley to learn more.
Want to see the work of others? Check out the Data Murals project led by MIT. You can explore the tools and activities used to develop these murals over at Data Culture.
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