Data visualization from a feminist perspective - Interview with Catherine D´Ignazio

Catherine D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and software developer who focuses on data literacy, feminist technology and civic art. She has run breastpump hackathons, created award-winning water quality sculptures that talk and tweet, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her research at the intersection of gender, technology and the humanities has been published in the Journal of Peer Production, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI). D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization at Emerson College, a faculty director of the Engagement Lab and a research affiliate at the MIT Center for Civic Media

Touch in the Time of Corona

The COVID-19 pandemic has hooked us all into digital networks as our access to cities, work and social gatherings is restricted and reconfigured. Weaving together cultural history, aesthetics, and urban and digital studies, this short volume reflects on how the possibilities for touch, touching and being touched, both physically and affectively, are reconfigured by the pandemic

Touch in the Time of Corona

The COVID-19 pandemic has hooked us all into digital networks as our access to cities, work and social gatherings is restricted and reconfigured. Weaving together cultural history, aesthetics, and urban and digital studies, this short volume reflects on how the possibilities for touch, touching and being touched, both physically and affectively, are reconfigured by the pandemic

Make data sing: The automation of storytelling

With slogans such as ‘Tell the stories hidden in your data’ ( www.narrativescience.com ) and ‘From data to clear, insightful content – Wordsmith automatically generates narratives on a massive scale that sound like a person crafted each one’ ( www.automatedinsights.com ), a series of companies currently market themselves on the ability to turn data into stories through Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques. The data interpretation and knowledge production process is here automated, while at the same time hailing narrativity as a fundamental human ability of meaning-making. Reading both the marketing rhetoric and the functionality of the automated narrative services through narrative theory allows for a contextualization of the rhetoric flourishing in Big Data discourse. Building upon case material obtained from companies such as Arria NLG , Automated Insights , Narrativa, Narrative Science , and Yseop , this article argues that what might be seen as a ‘re-turn’ of narrative as a form of knowledge production that can make sense of large data sets inscribes itself in – but also rearticulates – an ongoing debate about what narrative entails. Methodological considerations are thus raised on the one hand about the insights to be gained for critical data studies by turning to literary theory, and on the other hand about how automated technologies may inform our understanding of narrative as a faculty of human meaning-making