Reconstructing Community Culture Through Data Artist Visualizations

• In Event: Community, Design, and Data Reasoning in Youth Data Visualization Practices

Abstract

Purpose
Previous research has proposed that it is important to create spaces that support creative expression, position youth and community members as community experts, and value participant voice (Taylor & Hall, 2013). We explore one possible example of this space: an art exhibition when youth share artistic data visualizations they created about community-relevant topics with community members. This paper aims to describe the conversational opportunities afforded in this space, including conversations where individuals’ experiences are connected to data visualizations.
Perspectives
The art exhibition event was a community learning event, which are critical points of interaction between youth and their communities to foster discussion and learning. The event provides opportunities for youth artists to consider how to showcase their work and foster conversations with the community to communicate their work’s value and motivation. We conceptualize this event through the perspective of hybridity (Gutierrez et al., 1999), with a complex composition of different practices and discourses. This perspective highlights the need to attend to interaction through conversational discourse, including social, political, and material aspects of interaction.
Methods & Data Sources
We analyzed video and audio recordings of the 1-hour art exhibition event with approximately 50 attendees, which included youth data artists (i.e., who created visualizations shared), family members, and community partners. Data were collected from three focal visualizations (of 18 exhibited) created by 5 data artists. The data were first content logged, describing the verbal and physical interactions among people related to the visualization, and identifying units of conversations (46 total). We then inductively coded (Saldaña, 2015) conversations to identify different types of conversations, highlighting how community members responded to the visualizations through conversations with the data artists.
Substantiated Conclusions
We found conversations predominantly focused on data and data visualizations, though through a variety of different ways. Conversations included discussions about the meaning of the visualizations, which included asking the data artist to explain their visualization or a specific question (e.g., “Why are these ones red?”). Questions posed to data artists included those about the mathematics or data (e.g., about the sample size), and about artistic aspects (e.g., “How did you apply the paint?”). Community members also shared a personal story or experience related to the data visualization, and shared ideas for ways data artists could have created their visualization differently.
Scholarly Significance
The findings suggest that conversations did provide opportunities for hybridity that emphasize the connections among youth, community, and data art. For example, integrating data or mathematics with art in conversations, and by youth and community members both taking on positions afforded expertise at different times. Additionally, conversations provided opportunities for ideas that went beyond the data, such as sharing personal stories. Finally, the findings can inform the design of future community learning events, such as using features of the event space (e.g. the venue, signage, print materials, etc.) as tools for framing interactions from the different forms of hybridity we observed.

Authors

• Elizabeth B. Dyer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Thura Mack, University of Tennessee

• Lynn L. Hodge, University of Tennessee