Urban data and city dashboards: Six key issues

This chapter considers the relationship between data and the city by critically examining six key issues with respect city dashboards: epistemology, scope and access, veracity and validity, usability and literacy, use and utility, and ethics. While city dashboards provide useful tools for evaluating and managing urban services, understanding and formulating policy, and creating public knowledge and counter-narratives, our analysis reveals a number of conceptual and practical shortcomings. In order for city dashboards to reach their full potential we advocate a number of related shifts in thinking and praxes and forward an agenda for addressing the issues we highlight. Our analysis is informed by our endeavours in building the Dublin Dashboard

Dashboard design to assess the impact of distinct data visualization techniques in the dynamic analysis of survey’s results

A study of available data visualization techniques is required to comprehensively and accurately display real-time information. Customizing existing platforms and designing new specific display formats are among the important tasks for getting an accurate view of information. In this work we have carried out a bibliographic review on visualization of data, techniques and platforms of existing Dashboards. We implemented a generic and dynamic dashboard based on information collected in real time. The objective was to assess the impact of the Data Visualization Techniques available on the developed dashboard. Therefore, Dashboard users will be able to interact with the information, accessing at an early stage a set of pre-defined charts, tables, and reports produced by the Dashboard itself. At a later stage it will be possible for users to have greater control over the presentation of the data and to customize the views presented, generating graphs, tables and reports dynamically. This implementation allows you to test an existing set of data visualization techniques and dynamically generated new forms, showing that Dashboards can become a unique and powerful means of providing information

Mining modern repositories with elasticsearch

Organizations are generating, processing, and retaining data at a rate that often exceeds their ability to analyze it effec-tively; at the same time, the insights derived from these large data sets are often key to the success of the organi-zations, allowing them to better understand how to solve hard problems and thus gain competitive advantage. Be-cause this data is so fast-moving and voluminous, it is in-creasingly impractical to analyze using traditional offline, read-only relational databases. Recently, new “big data ” technologies and architectures, including Hadoop and NoSQL databases, have evolved to better support the needs of organizations analyzing such data. In particular, Elasticsearch — a distributed full-text search engine — explicitly addresses issues of scalability, big data search, and performance that relational databases were simply never designed to support. In this paper, we reflect upon our own experience with Elasticsearch and highlight its strengths and weaknesses for performing modern mining software repositories research

Faulty Metrics and the Future of Digital Journalism

This report explores the industry of Internet measurement and its impact on news organizations working online. It investigates this landscape through a combination of documentary research and interviews with measurement companies, trade groups, advertising agencies, media scholars, and journalists from national newspapers, regional papers, and online-only news ventures

Controversing Datafication through Media Architectures

In this chapter, we discuss a speculative and participatory “media architecture” installation that engages people with the potential impacts of data through speculative future images of the datafied city. The installation was originally conceived as a physical combination of digital media technologies and architectural form—a “media architecture”—that was to be situated in a particular urban setting. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it was produced and tested for an online workshop. It is centered on “design frictions” (Forlano and Mathew, 2014) and processes of controversing (Baibarac-Duignan and de Lange, 2021). Instead of smoothing out tensions through “neutral” data visualizations, controversing centers on opening avenues for meaningful participation around frictions and controversies that arise from the datafication of urban life. The installation represents an instance of how processes of controversing may unfold through digital interfaces. Here, we explore its performative potential to “interface” abstract dimensions of datafication, “translate” them into collective issues of concern, and spark imagination around (un)desirable datafied urban futures

Teaching analytics and teacher dashboards to visualise SET data: Implication to theory and practice

Teaching Analytics (TA) is an emergent theoretical approach that combines teaching expertise, visual analytics, and design-based research to support teachers' diagnostic pedagogical ability to use data as evidence to improve teaching quality. The thesis is focused on designing dashboards to help teachers visualise Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) data as a form of TA for improving the quality of teaching. The research examined the role of TA by deploying customisable dashboards to support teachers in using data to design and facilitate learning. The researcher carried out an integrated literature review to explore the notion of TA and SET data. Moreover, a Data Science Life Cycle model was proposed to guide teachers and researchers using SET data to improve learning and teaching quality. The research comprised several phases. In phase I, a simulated data technique was used to generate SET scores that informed the development of a preliminary teacher dashboard. Phase II surveyed teachers' use of SET data. The survey results indicated that more than half of the participants used SET for improving teaching practice. The research also showed that participants valued the free-text qualitative comments in SET data. Hence, phase III collected real free-text qualitative comments in SET data on students' perceptions of a previously tutored course. The survey results further indicated that although teachers were unaware of a dashboard's value in presenting data, they wanted to visualise SET data using dashboards. Phase IV redesigned the preliminary dashboards to present the real SET data and the simulated SET scores. Finally, phase V carried out usability testing to evaluate teachers' perceptions of usability and usefulness of the teacher's dashboards. Overall, the result of the usability study indicated the perceived value of the teacher's dashboards

Understanding Geographic, Temporal, and Multi-Dimensional Trends Using Visualization in Health Care

This study sought to determine whether utilizing visualization in health care would allow a wider audience of health professionals to understand geographic, temporal, and multidimensional trends in health data. A visual analytics tool was developed in Tableau that allowed users to dynamically and interactively interact with the tool in order to understand the impact of ACA Medicaid expansion. Data from the County Health Rankings & Roadmap was used (Rankings Data). The tool was made available to 5 participants who all had a connection to health care. An evaluation of the tool was conducted to determine if a visual analytics approach was useful in understanding geographic, temporal, and multidimensional trends and communicating health analytics information through the form of a use case. This study concluded that visualization was in fact an effective means through which to help a variety of users to understand geographic, temporal, and multidimensional trends.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Automated analysis of free-text comments and dashboard representations in patient experience surveys: a multimethod co-design study

BACKGROUND: Patient experience surveys (PESs) often include informative free-text comments, but with no way of systematically, efficiently and usefully analysing and reporting these. The National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (CPES), used to model the approach reported here, generates > 70,000 free-text comments annually. MAIN AIM: To improve the use and usefulness of PES free-text comments in driving health service changes that improve the patient experience. SECONDARY AIMS: (1) To structure CPES free-text comments using rule-based information retrieval (IR) (‘text engineering’), drawing on health-care domain-specific gazetteers of terms, with in-built transferability to other surveys and conditions; (2) to display the results usefully for health-care professionals, in a digital toolkit dashboard display that drills down to the original free text; (3) to explore the usefulness of interdisciplinary mixed stakeholder co-design and consensus-forming approaches in technology development, ensuring that outputs have meaning for all; and (4) to explore the usefulness of Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) in structuring outputs for implementation and sustainability. DESIGN: A scoping review, rapid review and surveys with stakeholders in health care (patients, carers, health-care providers, commissioners, policy-makers and charities) explored clinical dashboard design/patient experience themes. The findings informed the rules for the draft rule-based IR [developed using half of the 2013 Wales CPES (WCPES) data set] and prototype toolkit dashboards summarising PES data. These were refined following mixed stakeholder, concept-mapping workshops and interviews, which were structured to enable consensus-forming ‘co-design’ work. IR validation used the second half of the WCPES, with comparison against its manual analysis; transferability was tested using further health-care data sets. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) explored which toolkit features were preferred by health-care professionals, with a simple cost–benefit analysis. Structured walk-throughs with NHS managers in Wessex, London and Leeds explored usability and general implementation into practice. KEY OUTCOMES: A taxonomy of ranked PES themes, a checklist of key features recommended for digital clinical toolkits, rule-based IR validation and transferability scores, usability, and goal-oriented, cost–benefit and marketability results. The secondary outputs were a survey, scoping and rapid review findings, and concordance and discordance between stakeholders and methods. RESULTS: (1) The surveys, rapid review and workshops showed that stakeholders differed in their understandings of the patient experience and priorities for change, but that they reached consensus on a shortlist of 19 themes; six were considered to be core; (2) the scoping review and one survey explored the clinical toolkit design, emphasising that such toolkits should be quick and easy to use, and embedded in workflows; the workshop discussions, the DCE and the walk-throughs confirmed this and foregrounded other features to form the toolkit design checklist; and (3) the rule-based IR, developed using noun and verb phrases and lookup gazetteers, was 86% accurate on the WCPES, but needs modification to improve this and to be accurate with other data sets. The DCE and the walk-through suggest that the toolkit would be well accepted, with a favourable cost–benefit ratio, if implemented into practice with appropriate infrastructure support. LIMITATIONS: Small participant numbers and sampling bias across component studies. The scoping review studies mostly used top-down approaches and focused on professional dashboards. The rapid review of themes had limited scope, with no second reviewer. The IR needs further refinement, especially for transferability. New governance restrictions further limit immediate use. CONCLUSIONS: Using a multidisciplinary, mixed stakeholder, use of co-design, proof of concept was shown for an automated display of patient experience free-text comments in a way that could drive health-care improvements in real time. The approach is easily modified for transferable application. FUTURE WORK: Further exploration is needed of implementation into practice, transferable uses and technology development co-design approaches. FUNDING: The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme

Situating Data

Taking up the challenges of the datafication of culture, as well as of the scholarship of cultural inquiry itself, this collection contributes to the critical debate about data and algorithms. How can we understand the quality and significance of current socio-technical transformations that result from datafication and algorithmization? How can we explore the changing conditions and contours for living within such new and changing frameworks? How can, or should we, think and act within, but also in response to these conditions? This collection brings together various perspectives on the datafication and algorithmization of culture from debates and disciplines within the field of cultural inquiry, specifically (new) media studies, game studies, urban studies, screen studies, and gender and postcolonial studies. It proposes conceptual and methodological directions for exploring where, when, and how data and algorithms (re)shape cultural practices, create (in)justice, and (co)produce knowledge