Making Data Meaningful

We have data visualization, but can't we do better than that?

tags: data visualization, UX

I’m taking a small class (an ExCo) right now about data visualization. I’ll be doing a private reading next semester doing data visualizations. My creative writing capstone will be a data visualization comic narrative, telling stories through a unique mix of data, words, and visual patterns. Outside of myself, there’s blogs, conferences, and entire companies devoted to data visualization!

This is all well and good, and I’m really happy that we’ve begun to understand that one answer to the Big Data problem is to understand what makes things meaningful and understandable to humans and use those principles to make visuals that put data into context (to me, through this lens, data visualization is actually about and concerns the field of User Experience, UX). But, I keep having this thought: can’t we do better? Visuals are amazing, but not only are they not accessible to those with vision issues, or people who can’t run the latest hardware to run your interactive narrative, but visualizations only use one sense, don’t take advantage of the full range of human experience to understand data.

If we understand data quantification as a UX problem, then data visualization is only one answer. To represent the weight of national debt, you could have an interactive exhibit with various boxes of different weight representing the national debt over time. Data sonification (using sound to represent aspects of data) is a burgeoning technique, but still one that I haven’t seen used very much outside of the occasional NASA video. You could use texture to make maps accessible to those without vision. You could use a room full of sound clips, sped up, to narrate how the experience of a city is different from living in a more rural area. You could turn data about walking distances into an room that relates them, to scale, but makes them more difficult to walk on (i.e. more erratically generated artificial terrain the longer the distance). There’s a world of sculpture, sound, taste, balance, or smell, to explore!

I think we need to think about humanizing data as a project of data quantification, not just visualization. This would make big data more accessible, but that’s not the only reason to look at it this way: data quantification would make experiences a part of understanding data, would remind us, by creating a new experience, that experiences, had and felt and lived by real people, are what make data points so necessary to understand.