Ambiguity, Aesthetics, and Desire: Youth Data Visualization Practices

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

Abstract

Though arts-based data visualization often functions as a transdisciplinary practice, disciplines have diverse norms surrounding argumentation and storytelling that can influence these practices. For instance, tolerances for ambiguity vary widely by field. In contemporary art, ambiguity tends to elicit higher aesthetic judgments (Jekesh & Leder, 2009), whereas in mathematics, ambiguity is part of the creative mathematical process (Byers, 2007) but, ultimately, something with which to contend. Distinct disciplinary paradigms create lively tensions, potentially shaping youth visualization practices and audience receptions of those practices.
As arts-based data visualization has only begun to be implemented in educational contexts, little research has explored the generative tensions surrounding youths’ data-based and aesthetic intentions and choices. Research looking closely at the ways in which youth navigate arts-based data visualization is critical to supporting them in developing data-visualization literacy. As part of the MVP project, we sought to understand the data-based arguments and stories youth who engage in arts-based data visualization tell, the design decisions they make, and the issues inherent to these practices.
Engaging in design-based research, we focused on the three youth data visualizations for which we had participant consent and full data. To understand youths’ intentions and design decisions and the community responses that might illuminate any issues surrounding these practices, we reviewed youths’ data visualizations, data sets they visualized, artist statements, CLE video, and group interview transcripts.
To analyze data, we color coded artist statements and interview and CLE transcripts by “arguments,” “intentions,” “design choices,” and “impact.” Subsequently, we assigned a code to each line in highlighted sections. Then, we conducted a formal art analysis of each data visualization to compare the formal qualities, or visual elements, with the youths’ stated intentions. Last, we used pattern coding (Saldaña, 2021) to compare visualization approaches and issues across the youth.
In discussing their data visualizations, the five youth articulated understandings they had gleaned from the data, much of which surprised them, and explained how they had visually encoded this information. For instance, one youth, in visualizing middle school experiences, symbolically arranged pencils to signify each respondent, with painted bands indicating the type and frequency of the emotional descriptors respondents used.
For all three data visualizations, only one which had a key, youth were aware that, without their oral explanations, ideas could be “lost in translation” and many CLE attendees demonstrated confusion initially. However, rather than positioning this ambiguity as a communicative failing, youth were “pleased” with their less “definable” works; they compared them to “abstract art,” touted their aesthetic merits, and articulated their desire for viewers to “exercise [their] brain[s].” Correspondingly, sometimes their aesthetic concerns and other personal desires were foregrounded; at times, data was centered and, in other instances, it was obscured.
In statistics education, one critical visualization skill for youth to develop is clear communication (e.g., Rubin, 2020). This study exposes some socio-emotional and cultural tensions associated with this notion and suggests that ambiguity can be intentional and productive.

Author

• Joy Gaulden Bertling, University of Tennessee