Telling Stories with Data
Roberto Malfagia – Data driven stories
Bronwin Patrickson – Mobilising the record: The Documentary Functions of Mobile Tracking Applications
Julia Scott-Stevenson – Ethics and mess in data storytelling
Data driven stories
Our proposal is to show and analyze some of our project about data-driven stories: Data
Ulixes and DsinRete. In these projects, we explored the possibility of dramatizing data and
building narratives. Both projects explore the possibilities of new types of inclusion and inter-
disciplinary modes.
Data Ulixes is an interactive Data Driven Story. SWG data science society, partner at the
Internet Festival of Pisa has conducted an investigation into the main issues related to the
culture of the networks explored in the VI edition of the festival. Data Ulixes is the narration
and advanced data visualization that shows and, at the same time, continues the survey. By
following a fictional character during the day, the user can view the search data
contextualized in the character’s activities and will be able to help and express his / her
preferences by participating in the quest, leaving it open, dynamic, and constantly updating.
The result of the choices made, is returned in real time, through a data visualization.
Link: www.dataulixes.com
DSinRete is an example of data driven stories, but, at same time another way to expose an
accademic survey. This interactive narrative is intended to describe the national research
data DsinRete (2014-2016), designed to investigate the value, role, structure, evolution and
characteristics of the professional networks of Italian School Executives. DsinRete sees the
combination of different elements and languages: data visualization made through
processing code; video themes in depth; tool to reformulate your ideas as a THNK Reframe
Tool; interactive charts; user-upgradeable databases, through form compilations. But
DsinRete is not just data. Based on these, a new vision of professional networks is presented,
with academic articles, interview and downloadable scientific publications.
Link: www.8822code.org/indire
Mobilising the record: The Documentary Functions of Mobile Tracking Applications
The documentary genre grew out of the mediatized capacity to record (as well as reconstruct) actually as it is. By reviewing a number of mobile tracking applications, I consider what they can add to these dual capacities.
As anytime-anywhere recording devices, mobile tracking applications are intimately placed recorders of physical movement, networked activity and local events such as weather and even mood (demonstrated by physical indicators). They can record, archive and analyse running and walking activities, time online, money transferred and even the time spent sleeping. It seems as if our very breath is being articulated – and over a much longer time period than most audio-visual recorders would allow. Despite concerns that daily existence is being overly quantified, these personal archiving tools can also potentially help to dispel ignorance e.g. by tracking the real time working commitments of casual labour.
Common to most definitions of documentary, including Grierson’s seminal promotion of the creative treatment of actuality’ (as cited by Hardy 1946, 11) is the presumption that audio-visual media can somehow provide a reliable record of events. Documentary genre conventions, such as cinema vérité, tend to reinforce this assumption, regardless of the fact that audio-visual recordings can easily be manipulated both during and after production through such variations as the choice of locations, the time of the recordings, the use of framing and lighting conventions, shutter speed, filters, microphones and even the choice of camera.
Mobile tracking applications tell stories every time they present a view of reality. For this reason, it is important to unmask the ways that seeming objective data traces can also be manipulated by variables such as the unquestioning application of existing organisational structures. The placement of meeting points in majority white neighbourhoods in the popular mobile tracking and hunting game, Pokémon Go is a recent case in point.
The individuals being tracked, however, do not always control mobile tracking applications. When surveillance is no longer a choice, but a necessity of participation it seems that whatever privacy concerns this raises are muted by the desire to engage with the broader, mobile public. Therefore in relation to this topic it is important to also consider the ways that people are using mobile applications to either resist, or at least manage these changes.
Hardy, Forsyth. 1946. Grierson on Documentary: Edited with an Introduction by Forsyth Hardy: Collins.
Ethics and mess in data storytelling
I will present an early stages exploration of the intersections between interactive factual storytelling and ideas of surveillance, privacy, identity and data. There are significant public concerns around the increasing collection of personal data online, and a related and concerning issue is the feeding of such data into algorithms that then make broad and often biased assumptions about groups of people. This is perhaps an updated version of an older concern – Douglas Harper, a visual sociologist writing in 2004 on the working class of the USA, noted that the larger the sample group of people being studied, the more data that is obtained but the more unreal and impersonal the conclusions.
Documentary media has long been a solution of sorts to this problem – individual stories, individual voices, give a personal insight into much larger issues. i-docs, too, can offer these individual stories, yet there is a tension here – they can also encounter the ethical conundrum of data collection. Do Not Track, for instance, is a 2015 i-doc that presents to the audience a personalised representation of how we are tracked online, by collating (with consent) the data of its viewers. Might i-docs offer some insight into this current dilemma of representation, data collection and digital rights? How do we tell ethical stories about this issue?