Resources for the course, 'Taming Treacherous Data: Ethical Data Visualization', by Katherine Hepworth. This course is taught at DHDownunder. This course teaches participants how to use ethical visualization principles and practices to visualize treacherous, or culturally problematic, data. Such data includes racist historical documents, ideologically laden materials, culturally controversial texts, politically charged topics, gendered works, etc. Aimed at people who work with culturally sensitive datasets, and those who are interested in critical reflection on visualization practice, the course will combine hands-on activities and discussion. Participants will create data visualizations using R Studio Cloud and instructor-provided stock code, and then interrogate their visualizations, identifying the extent and severity of the ethical pitfalls they inevitably contain. All work herein is available under a Creative Commons license.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . ------
- 45 minutes: Class overview and three question introduction
- 9 minute Class overview
- 26 minute Three question introductions:
- Where are you based?
- How would you describe what you do in 1 short sentence?
- Which adjective would describe you best right now?
- 10 minutes: IMPROV adjective activity
- 10 minutes: EBMC Multicultural Interactions
- 60 minutes: Lecture and discussion:
- Introduction to Data Visualization: visual conventions & first principles — Visual hierarchy, legibility, and color
- 20 minutes: Break
- 60 minutes: Lecture and discussion:
- Arguments in Visualizations: implicit & explicit
- 80 minutes: Activity: Gun Deaths in Florida
- in pairs activity Make Gun Deaths in Florida charts (analog and/or digital)
- 10 minute real-world controversy
- 5 minute exploration of FDLE data
- 15 minute discussion best ways of visualizing data
- 40 minute download Gun Deaths in Florida R code and open in a new project on your instance of RStudio Cloud OR draw visualizations
- Open RStudio Cloud (https://rstudio.cloud) and log in
- Create a new project in RStudio Cloud
- Copy the R code from:https://github.com/cmchurch/DHSI-ethical-dataviz/tree/master/r-code
- Paste code into your new project
- With guidance from instructors, edit code to make the chart more unethical, then more ethical
- in pairs activity Make Gun Deaths in Florida charts (analog and/or digital)
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60 minutes: Lecture & Discussion: Statistics
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55-70 minutes: Show & tell yesterday's work
- 45-60 minutes: Snow & Ice and Gun Deaths analog and digital visualizations
- Take turns presenting your work, and state: what your malicious intent was, what you were happy with about the work, what you would would have done differently if you had more time and/or skills
- 10 minute discussion of other versions
- 45-60 minutes: Snow & Ice and Gun Deaths analog and digital visualizations
- 20 minutes: Break
- 40 minutes: _The Dark Arts and_Good, Bad, and Ugly Activity: _Examples and discussion:_Exploring Sample Visualizations —Best and worst practices
- 60 minutes: Lecture & Discussion: Ethical Visualization Workflow
- Hepworth, K. J., "Big Data Visualisation: Promises and Pitfalls". Communication Design Quarterly. 4(4), 7–19.
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10 minutes: Integration
- 5 minute group check-in re energy levels and activities for today
- 5 minute visual arguments and treachery reflection group discussion
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180 minutes: Discussion & Activity: Making your first ethical data visualization
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15 minute Discussion, in pairs:
- Study the following two charts:
- What is ethical and unethical about these charts?
- Why?
- Write list of (or sketch) useful/ethical qualities in these charts you might want to reproduce
- Study the following two charts:
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60 minute Analog activity, in pairs:
- Use the steps and questions in the ethical visualization handout to recreate this chart with pens and paper (refer to the ethical visualization workflow handout for more detail)
- Choose an audience to communicate data about stopping distances and a goal for this audience
- Decide on changes/additions/substractions to data/images/captions appropriate for this audience
- Choose a media and format appropriate for communicating this data to your audience
- Recreate this chart on graph paper to demonstrate your decisions
- Use the steps and questions in the ethical visualization handout to recreate this chart with pens and paper (refer to the ethical visualization workflow handout for more detail)
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100 minute Digital activity, in pairs:
- Recreate your visualization, using one of the following:
- R Studio Cloud with stock BBC Snow and Ice code, editing as necessary to get as close as possible to your drawing
- A more detailed handdrawn illustration, paying more careful attention to composition, color, text etc
- A digital version using graphics software, such as:
- Illustrator, (Autodraw.com)[https://www.autodraw.com/], (Sketch.io)[https://sketch.io/], Google Slides, (Canva)[https://www.canva.com] and/or a combination of these programs
- Open RStudio Cloud (https://rstudio.cloud) and log in
- Create a new project in RStudio Cloud
- With guidance from instructors, edit code to make the chart more unethical, then more ethical
- Recreate your visualization, using one of the following:
- 30 minutes: Show Your Work Document for Snow and Ice Visualization
- Create a document to show the ethical decisions you made during your visualization process in snow and ice. Sections to include:
- Audience and goal
- In a sentence summarize ie "This viusalizaiton was designed for..."
- Data sources
- List your data sources (and links). Describe why they were appropriate.
- Data supplementation/cleaning/verification
- Describe in a sentence any calculation processes performed.
- Sketches/concepts explored
- Describe development of visualization, including:
- number of versions/drafts
- number of rounds of user testing
- other conceptual directoins tried
- any other releant additions/directions
- Describe development of visualization, including:
- Ethics disclaimer/request for corrections
- Something along the lines of "This data is represented as accurately and ethically to our best knowledge. If you know of more up-to-date data or ethical representations, please share them with us at: ."
- Audience and goal
- Create a document to show the ethical decisions you made during your visualization process in snow and ice. Sections to include:
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60 minutes: Ensuring Ethical Use of Data
- **30 minutes:**Documentation: Introducting Memos of Understanding and Position Statemments:Memos of Understanding
- 30 minutes: _Activity:_Writing 500-1000 word position statements on your own visualization practice, based on socio-cultural considerations of their subject and audience.
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60 minutes: Show and tell: Presenting your ethical visualizations
- Use the graph paper and stock visualization codes in RStudio Cloud to create your first ethical visualizations of your own data. Some resources: