Summary
So much discussion is happening these days that is backed up with data visualization, but the problem is, misinformation and trust issues could arise due to the fact that these visualizations are not fully understood, or can’t be reproduced to more accurate versions unless the author of the vis decides to do so. In this work, I want to explore simple and lightweight workflows to democratize the process of discussing data on the web for social and knowledge seeking purposes. I looked into existing tools that empower users to visualize data on the web but they are disconnected from where the discussion is happening (i.e. social media). I’m proposing building a solution that is a layer over online communities that discusses data visualizations to allow community members to visualize and reproduce visualizations in-situ to improve the commenting experience and enrich online discussion around data stories .
The community
Any community that has discussion around data visualizations with the goal to effectively convey information. For the sake of this assignment, I’m focusing on blogs or reddit.
Problems to address
Centralized Discussion
Sometimes users want to take the vis somewhere else to discuss it with another type of community. Also, sometimes users want to reproduce a different version and share it to their own niche. Can we make that discussion more decentralized?
Effective utilization of the Collective effort to Improve Data stories
Members of these communities are continuously fact checking the conclusions and data used, leading them to a healthy explorative behavior in which they probe, investigate and inquire about the conclusions, the data and the visualization. How do we capture that provenance and lineage for others to leverage on? Reading the visualization story alone is not as rich and useful as reading the discussion about it. That collective knowledge is what makes these data stories more appealing and informative.
Technical challenges in reproducing work and science
Many members in these communities expressed in their comments that they would like to build a visualization similar to what the author shared. There were many questions about how, and what in regards to the process. While this could be a sign of a healthy community that wants to learn. While the instructions and the language are encouraging, the affordances are not yet inviting to novice users. And that is a problem I want to be working on in my project for this class.
Proposed Solution
For building the user experience of the tool I will use a simple template-based approach for authoring the visualizations, and a library in the background to build the visualization using D3 and D3Plus. The tool consists of two main components: Web App and a Chrome Extension for authoring the visualization. The most important part in this project is the discussion and commenting experience, how can we include interactive visualizations in the comments that are reproduced with better data and design decisions. My hope is to create a community that discusses data visualization with data visualization not just with text.
1 reply on “Proposal: Fixing Online Discussion around Data Vis”
This is a terrific, well-bounded problem to tackle. It might be especially good to identify a community, like r/dataisbeautiful, to use as alpha users and to interview before you start building. I like the idea of a space that allows people to use a template and create their own visualization with it – the model of the Python notebook might be one you want to consider as a model for building this system. I would recommend trying some early experiments – can you structure a discourse around a visualization that participants can reproduce on an existing community like r/dataisbeautiful, collect results on what people said and did and use it to iterate your design?