Art + Data
Migration of the Ladybugs, 2009 - Tiffany Chung
Hello, we are Chelsea and Liz!
Agenda + Goals
Today we hope you find inspiration, think about data in a new way, make something and build your confidence using data.
“From tiny experiences we build cathedrals”
- Orhan Pamuk
What words come to mind when you think of data?
What feelings come to mind when you think about reading/using data?
Data [ dey-tuh, dat-uh, dah-tuh ]
Data are measurements extracted from the flux of the real - Mitchell Whitelaw
Data are the things that a group measures and cares about - Mimi Onuoha
A contextual, situated, and imperfect recording of some phenomenon in the world
Data about anything—a sentence, a bird, the temperature of a room, the age of the universe, the sentiment of a tweet, the flow of a river—is an artifact of one fleeting moment of measurement and is as much a record of the human doing the measuring as it is of the thing being measured.
Data as a campfire
Taking data out of spreadsheets and charts in order to captivate, spur discussions, and reach more people…
Types we are talking about today…
Civic Data
Data related to community life and the choices and policies that affect people and places.
Includes data published by local, state, and federal governments as well as personal data that, if collected & organized, could be used to tell alternative stories.
Data may also become civic data if used for a community purpose.
Personal Data
Any data or information that can be linked to an identifiable person.
Sometimes called personal information or personally identifiable information (PII).
We may intentionally create, save and share personal data. It may also be created about us through our engagement with various systems and technologies.
Collections Data
Data or information about collections held by libraries, archives, and museums.
Data or information about how users engage with collections or services.
May be published on institutional dashboard sites or as open access datasets.
Street Tree Data
Mona Chalabi
Data journalist - focuses on hand-drawn data visualizations to highlight the imprecision of data.
The lines aren’t completely straight to show that there is a margin of error in all data sets.
Mona Chalabi. The Gray-Green Divide (detail), 2022. Ink and colored pencil on paper, dimensions variable. © Mona Chalabi.
In a time of pandemic and rising temperatures, The Gray-Green Divide asks which neighborhoods lack vegetation—and at what cost.
Mona Chalabi's site-specific installation at the Brooklyn Museum probes the inequities of access to trees. (all photos Jasmine Liu/Hyperallergic)
Ian Leahy and Yaryna Serkez for NYT Opinion look at income and tree canopy in major cities. Higher median income neighborhoods correlate with cleaner and cooler air.
311 Data
A Week of Complaints, Stefanie Posavec and Georgia Lupi
Health Data
The Sleep Blanket
“A visualization of my son's sleep pattern from birth to his first birthday. Crochet border surrounding a double knit body. Each row represents a single day. Each stitch represents 6 minutes of time spent awake or asleep.
The original plan was to crochet the entire blanket but I switched to double knitting because the data was much more clearly visualized and the color changes (of which there were literally thousands) were significantly easier.”
Asthma-Related Data
Quilters Without Borders
The Asthma Quilt
Each color-coded block shows asthma incidence by census tract, with the locations of public housing projects and area hospitals embroidered in. The map is about a health problem, says Harmon, but it’s also about poverty and inequality. “That information is coming to you in such an unexpected way—a soft, beautiful quilt. But then, a quilt can also be smothering.... It’s really interesting how those two things work together. The medium, and the content.”
Data related to housing…
Harrison Kinnane Smith
Boxes full of items suggesting Black ownership, removed from a Highland Park house, are the centerpiece of an installation art exhibit by Harrison Kinnane Smith at the Mattress Factory in Central Northside.
The house was appraised twice — once with a Black person presenting as the owner, and with the African American-themed items, and once with a white person and without the items. The difference was $36,000.
“In 2016 I was sifting through hundreds of archival collection materials from the W.W. Law Collection, a collection dedicated to prominent Civil Rights leader Westley Wallace Law (1923–2002). I began to contemplate the challenges that patrons often encounter when conducting archival research for the first time. Finding Aid is my creative response to sharing stories and connections pertaining to local Civil Rights activists in Savannah utilizing QR code technology and digitized primary sources.”
Salary data
“We have LOST 30 library colleagues over the last year ALONE due to poor pay and working conditions. These pumpkins have the position titles listed of the folks who have moved on to better jobs elsewhere!”
University of Washington Library Strike
Data as dance…
We learn to interact with the world around us through touch and movement from the moment we’re born. Yet most work around data is centered on screens and spreadsheets that remove context and limit our ability to engage with the information in an embodied way, relate it to the world around us, and create positive change.
Thinking about how we interact with data
Questions? Reflections…
https://nathaliemiebach.com/weatherscores.html
Data Sculpture Activity!
Pair up if you’d like!
Take 20-30 minutes to build a physical representation of the data.
This is a 'think with your hands activity'.
Bar charts are NOT allowed!
“It brings up this question of whether or not data can ever be treated as an artistic medium? I believe in the old lesson you learn from any craftsperson, which is that to truly understand a material you have to burn it, twist it, break it, melt it, play with it, but most of all fail with it a thousand times for you to even begin to understand where its true parameters and possibilities lie. If you take that same approach with data, you find yourself very quickly in uncomfortable territory.
To break, to twist, to play with data means to soil some kind of purity we imbue data with. Data becomes “Bad Data,” which renders it unusable. I’m fascinated by that because we associate data with truth and facts and any kind of alteration is seen as a violation of that notion.
How can we ever truly understand data if we are never allowed to fail with it? I wonder, is there a way we can treat it like a material but still allow it to retain its position as a kernel of truth? Does playing or translating data into art necessarily mean that we compromise its integrity as a container of fact? I think that is where the poetry of data lies for me — in that very divide between data as a container of fact and data as a material.” - Nathalie Miebach
“How can we ever truly understand data if we are never allowed to fail with it?”
Want to talk more!? Us too…
The End
Wow so cool