Collecting, Debating and Contesting Data through Visualization

Data visualization interfaces remain artifacts of a unidirectional creation and communication process: from the data source to the audience. This process is curated by designers and domain experts with specific goals, tasks, and audiences in mind. Typically, this results in a dedicated, but possibly single-sided perspective onto the data. One example for this are visualizations of urban data collected by governments or corporations. The audience of such visualizations are citizens, who have relevant knowledge through their everyday experience of the city - but they have no means of voicing their perspective within the visualization.

We revisit the concept of participatory visualization: Prior work on this topic has focused on ways of working together to shape the visual representation or annotation of data. We look at the participatory potential of visualization interfaces as an invitation to start a dialogue about the data it represents. Participatory visualization can create a fruitful tension between visualizing the data for common understanding and using the visualizations as an interface for data collection, verification, contestation, and discussion.

We describe efforts that imply interrogation, annotation, and discussion of data. The focus and novelty of this participatory visualization lies in its strong focus on including a diverse, remote, and large audience that has a personal perspective on the data. This poses challenges for storytelling, literacy, and annotation:

How do people express themselves in data visualizations? In co-located workshops, participants can annotate printed visualizations. We seek expressions of personal relations to the presented data and how these expressions change with different settings and datasets. We are looking for patterns in the expressions that allow conclusions about their intention, form, content, and where in the visualization they anchor.

What are incentives for people to share their opinions and what interfaces do they need for that? Based on the previous conclusions, we imagine digital user interfaces that allow for more scalable, remote annotation of visualizations. For example, using participatory maps to let citizens contest census data about their neighborhood based on their everyday experience. This process comes with the challenge to determine what incentives motivate people to share personal perspectives.

How can we visualize these personal perspectives? Existing visualization techniques and design patterns are insufficient to represent situated knowledge that is not objective, but personal, polyvocal and socially constructed. After extending the visualization pipeline to the considerate and deliberate collection of data, we expect to collect insights that culminate in strategies to embed qualitative data in visualizations.

There is an increasing, yet mostly theoretical recognition of the situated and constructed nature of data. With participatory visualization we work towards a practical approach to collect and represent personal relations to institutional datasets. This can be used in various scenarios: Stakeholders in policy-making benefit from scalable tools to crowdsource people's opinions - for example in urban planning, where institutional planners as well as activists and citizen scientists seek to integrate local perspectives on issues like urban mobility, housing policy, or climate change impact. The idea also applies to data-driven journalism: As of now, readers of data dossiers can comment the articles as a whole, but have little possibility to change the granularity and aim of their contributions. With more precise annotation interfaces, participatory data dossiers can become audience-driven online representations of discussed topics.