Rahul Bhargava - Keynote

Thank you. I'm gonna hold this because I like standing up while I'm talking. Um, so it's wonderful to be here and as Margo said, especially after last year in Pueba meeting the community at CCN comp, I was just really excited and then they said that their theme was community and data and I said, "Wait, you know that's the title of my book, right? So, I would love to connect on something." Um, so I'm very excited to be here. Uh, I'm going to turn on uh captions because I'm going to be speaking in English. So, if you have a hard time with me speaking too fast, maybe that'll help uh you understand it and it gets some of it right. It gets most of it right. So, today I want to talk about one of the themes in my book, which is making mirrors not windows. And I'll dig into a little bit about what that means. Um specifically in community data settings. Um but I want to start with a story um a story about uh data and power and sort of some things we have to rethink in community settings. Um especially related to history. So, I'll ask you if you can for a minute um to think about a scene like this. So, a crowded market street um and just close your eyes for a minute and I want to take you back and think about the sounds of a market. Think about the smells of a market and think about No, I actually mean it. Like close your eyes and try to imagine it. Okay, great. Thank you. And think about a market, the hustle and bustle. And think about a young man. Um let's call him Aim. Aim is a young man. He works at a factory. His mother is sick and he's rushing to work through the middle of a market like this. He's pushing people out of the way. He knows he's late. He's been late before. Um and his uh mother was sick. He was taking care of her all night. Um and he's worried about her and he knows he need to get to work so that he doesn't get docked. Um and he also knows that he needs to get back home to take care of his mom. So he gets to work. He makes it through this market. Um, and his boss is waiting for him uh outside with a tablet registering people coming in. Um, and he's late despite his efforts. He's been slowed down by the market and he's late. And so his boss, you know, castigates him like says, "Hey, you're late. You've been late too many times." Um, and he marks him down on the tablet. He marks him down as late. Um, and too many of those marks and he'll be fired and then there'll be a whole other world of problems to solve. So, okay, open your eyes. Hopefully, you took you to a little scene and set it up. Um, that could have been today, but that scene is from 3,000 years ago. Um, and the tablet that was being marked down is not an iPad. The tablet that was being used was this ostrachon, um, which is in the British Museum. Uh, and it it's a piece of broken clay that was used to write on. And this specific one notes down why people relate to work. Um, and that's I think it's a multiple reasons. We have things like um libating with his father. Um, his daughter was bleeding or taking care of a sick mother or wrapping the corpse of his mother like embalming her. Um, so this is a 3,000-year-old example of data being used to keep track of people, right? To keep track of whether you were late to work or not. Like those are jobs I worked when I was younger. I remember this. This is a pattern that's been happening for a long time. Um to put it more pointedly uh data has been used to track and assess people since the dawn of writing. Um and that's important to acknowledge uh because if we want to think about data in community settings, we have to think about that power dynamic, right? the dynamic that might be baked into systems that we use with data um that are built around data that are about self-determination. That's mainly the version of power that I want to talk about. Um so, uh we have to reset those imbalances in that historical trend. If we want to do community, we have to think about which of these things are we really focusing on. Um and that's what some of my work tries to do because the goals while the methods we use for data right now came to maturity let's say in the sciences, business, maybe epidemiology to be more specific, statistics. Um the goals of community spaces include things like this which are not the same as those other goals. Right? In community spaces, we want to think about participation and we want to think about your belief in your ability to make change, efficacy. We want to think about joy and fun and like who is in the data and who gets to use it. Um, so that drives a lot of my work, my work to make mirrors and not windows. Um, so usually I characterize most data projects as windows that are being used to look through at some other set of people, right? So the data producer, the data analyst might be sitting inside looking through this window of data to try to understand something they're not a part of. And I believe that we need to make more mirrors. Mirrors where a community can look at data itself and try to interpret that and represent it and tell their own story. So a lot of my work is trying to accomplish that. And I just find that metaphor really helpful for me to sort of think about the work that I'm doing because I think this toolbox is is too small. It's things like surveys, charts, and spreadsheets. These things are useful. I'm not saying they aren't useful. Um, what I'm saying is that toolbox wasn't designed for community settings that have some of those goals I shared. And so then the key question for me in this work is what does a bigger toolbox look like? If I'm saying that toolbox is either ineffective at accomplishing those goals or inappropriate and that it uh it it removes some people from a conversation because they don't speak that language of data, then what is the alternative? Right? If there's a small toolbox here, what is a bigger toolbox? So, in this talk, as I've just set up, I want to talk about alternatives. Um, and the alternatives for me are uh artsbased experiences that look like these. So, I'm going to talk about each of these examples of my work, connections to other people's work, and what I'm finding out from trying these methods out. Um, I want to talk about producing data community murals, creating data sculptures, uh, doing data theater in community settings, and then, uh, producing data music. Um, so I want to do those four and I'm going to give you an example of each and then try to tease out like some of the underlying principles, but I want to be very uh concrete in this talk. I'm going to show you specific things that I've done that uh we had a lot of fun doing and some of the impacts that we found. Um, in that way I want to get at the theme of the conference, right? Like what does it mean to do collaborative data work in community settings and specifically often focused on representation of that work. um less focused on the production of data uh more focused on the communication and for me bringing people together around data. So data as as a campfire data to bring people together to accomplish all the other things they want to do in community. So let's start with the first one. Data murals. This is the one I've been doing the longest. Um and uh data murals are artifacts that have been used to influence public opinion for for a long time. If you look at the history, especially in South America, um there's just been a ton looked at about the way that they operate. And then specifically participatory community murals where you invite people in to help you with the design and the painting and the creation of the mural um is a practice that I learn a lot from. Um so data very often looks like these spreadsheets over here, right? When we think data, often people think of that. In my work, I tend to look a little bit more like this. Uh in this case, people are still creating a spreadsheet, but they're doing it on the wall um with pencil and paper. And it's just a different invitation to people to engage. Um and specifically, it's an invitation that gets around very much in the US a hesitation to do to work with data because people think of math and numbers. And the US education system is really good at making people think they're not good at math and numbers. Um, and most of the data work that I do in community or that I do myself is really just dividing or maybe like adding and dividing in different ways and like those are pretty basic skills. My kids are great at those. Um, and counting. So, these are things we're good at and just knowing how to divide and when and knowing when to count. Um, those are the essential elements. And when I do it this way, it helps me get people into that mindset. So, when we're doing community mural, they end up looking like this. Um so community uh data mural is a a process that we lead that starts with talking with stakeholders in a community about some data set that they want to bring people together around to paint a mural to tell a story. Convening people to find a story in that data. We usually prepare like a two or three page handout um uh that includes like an appropriate level of data literacy. So in the US uh with youth like this it usually means I can use pie charts and bar charts and tables. Um that's in that context. In other countries I've done it, it's a little bit different. Um so getting the key players together, um bringing people together to find a story, collaborative designing a visual to tell that story, and then painting it on a wall. Um all of which are really fun because they bring people together in a creative practice. Um and this borrows from the rhetorical power or like the power of the visual in public space, right? The power of a giant wall painted. So, this is a mural that uh all this work is with my wife who's there, Emily, um who is a a facilitator, an artist, and muralist. And this is in my hometown. Uh it's actually right next, if you're ever in Somerville in Boston, this is right next to a chocolate factory that's there. Um so, it's great to visit because you get to go to the chocolate factory. And you can also see the mural. Uh so, this is a a mural that tells a story of a community group in in the area which is doing urban farming. And it looks a lot like an infographic. You can see a person there, a youth on the left. So, it's maybe um like 80 mters long and like two and a half meters high. Uh and it's a corrugated paint fence. So, uh they wanted to tell a story about as you see on the left uh some of the health problems that are happening in their community and then how they're planting a bunch of uh raised beds. So, they're creating uh wooden raised beds, putting soil in there in like an unused parking lot basically and they're growing vegetables. Add to that uh a mobile market that goes around and delivers those vegetables and sells them for super cheap um at appropriate places where people need that. Add to that you see somebody holding a a pitchfork and the quote says before working here I never realized that vegetables taste I think it says I never ate vegetables but now I know vegetables taste good. Right? So like actual experiences where people say oh wow this like this carrot is really delicious. Um, which I recognize because my son like he doesn't he hates broccoli ex unless it's broccoli that we've grown in our garden. They don't eat all of it. And so I I get that. It feels very personal to me. And then add to that 400 youth from schools that are being employed at the farms to help maintain them. And then equals it's a formula together living better. This was created based on a story based on a data handout about the amount of area that they're using, what they're planting, how the sales are going, youth reactions in the group. So it was actually youth that designed this story based on the surveys that had been done of them, right? So the data was about them and they were actually finding a story they wanted to tell in it. And then we had a big ceremony where the mayor came and cut a ribbon. And then we heard years later they were still telling the story of this mural as a way to explain the urban revitalization that was happening in the city. Um so that's one example. Uh this is a little bit about the process. If you're curious to see more, I have QR codes sprinkled throughout the presentation. So that one takes you to data murals.org or which has photos of some of the other murals we've done and then also an academic paper we wrote about um the learnings at a mural we did in in um in Kuruchiba in Brazil. Um and we found that in the short term we see impacts like what you might hope to see uh like data literacy in the participants goes up uh their willingness to work with numbers and their confidence in their ability. So their their belief in their ability to work with information goes up. Um and uh we also it also brought disperate groups together, groups that usually don't talk to each other. In the longer term, we saw impacts uh thinking about data as a material to be creative with, right, which weren't there before. Um we see intersections in how participants are thinking about the arts and sciences being things that can go together. Um and then we also have impacts on the community itself, right? Shifting conversation by creating murals. Um, and now this work has inspired a bunch of public health murals in Tanzania and Kenya. We have uh another person who did one in Norway. So these over the last 15 years, this has grown in a way that feels really exciting to me um because it's uh something you can pull off very easily and creates impacts that you can see very quickly and flips that ownership um to the community setting. I'm not the only one doing this type of work. Um, especially in the 2010s, there was something in the water when we started. Uh, a bunch of other people were thinking about how to put data in space and in place. Um, these are some examples from around the world that certainly inspire me. Um, and I think there's more and more of that work now, which I'm super excited about. Okay, so murals. Second piece, sculptures. Um, I want to think about sculptures as uh objects that exist in a space. um and they serve to provoke dialogue uh about things that are going on in your community. So what is a data sculpture? Um let me give you an example. Um I want to start with this is data charts that we're used to seeing. Um this is a chart of SNAP enrollments in the US. So SNAP is a state um governed but a federal program to help give you money to help buy food. So you get a little debit card uh and then you can use that to pay for food. Uh so it's like food assistance from the state and this is from the period of the pandemic in 2020. You see in March everything shut down and SNAP applications soared um because people suddenly lost their livelihoods and they needed help with food. Then you see it go down as the federal government passed a law that gave um that funded a ton of money to be to be sent out via SNAP. So you see it go down because like suddenly people were getting assistance and then that program expired and they didn't renew it in July and then it went up again. This was impacting specifically the communities I live in in Massachusetts immensely. There were people that suddenly needed to access food assistance systems who had never needed to before. Right? People that were like, "Oh, I'm stable. I don't need that." Were suddenly waiting in line for half an hour to get food um and learning how to access the system, which was challenging. So this felt really important. My wife and I, we both work on food security. It's an issue that's important for us. So, we said, "All right, well, there's a data story in here." Um, because this chart is kind of overwhelming. Um, but if you look at the numbers, something a little bit more understandable or imaginable to a person is that in the early months of the pandemic, an average of 1,659 households were applying for SNAP benefits every day. So, that many more households were asking for help each day. And that number felt understandable even though it's shocking. Um so we said what can we do to get people involved on this issue. And what we decided to do was we decided to build this table. Um again this is work with my wife. Um and we created this in 2021 and it's been touring since then. Well right now it's not out. It's in my garage. Um but otherwise it's been touring. Uh it is a table made up of 1,659 pieces of cutlery. So, forks, knives, and spoons welded together. You can see some of the pieces up there. Um, my wife did all the welding. I welded like three pieces and they fell off right away. She's the welder in the family. Um, and it weighs about 150 pounds. It's a full-size table, so it takes a lot of work to move it, but it fits in our car, in our van. Um, so this piece, we wanted to create it to speak, I mean, you see it speaks in the language of food, right? The idea is to sit down at this table and as a piece of artwork, it just invites people to come up to it and say, "Oh, what is that?" You know, it operates with that language of sculpture where it helps provoke questions rather than providing answers. And I think a lot of the data presentations we try to work with as data scientists or data people, we try to think about providing answers. And sometimes this work is more about like getting people to ask the question, especially on taboo topics. We don't talk about food security in the US even though the prevalence is really high. In Massachusetts, in the state I live in, one in five children suffer from food insecurity at some point in their lives. Um, so this is a really serious problem in a very affluent place. Um, so we created this piece. If you want to see some more photos and stuff, that QR code takes you to a mini website that uh was also linked to on the placard next to it. And our goal was to again provoke those questions to have people walk up to it and say, "Yo, what is that?" And that happened whenever we showed it. We showed it at town halls, farmers markets, public events. Um, and we had stories where somebody came up to us at a at a farmers market. He actually helped us install it. He was like helping us carry it. And he said, "Yo, like what is this?" And we told him what it was. And he said, "Wait, can I apply for that?" And we said, "Yes, there's a table right over there." and we walked him over to help him apply for it because he didn't know about the program and he qualified for assistance. So, it functioned not only to help educate that the opportunity existed. Um, instead of like otherwise you see a table with a bunch of papers on it at like a farmers market, you're not going to walk up to this. Nobody walks up to those tables. But a a giant table made out of forks and knives gets you to ask those questions. Um, so it functioned in that way. Um, it also functioned in art galleries and more wealthy suburbs of Boston as a way to remind people that that problem existed in their community. So the there's a lot of oh that happens somewhere else thinking whereas in those suburbs there is a need. So whenever we showed it there we would have this placard and we would have flyers from local community groups you could volunteer with. So it helped people get involved in the issue. And then we had as well we had like a looping video when we showed it in those galleries that helped understand the scale of the problem that had interviews and those videos are on the website. Um it's a data story right one number that's all we started with. We went through all this the whole all their presentations all the data we ended up with one number being an opportunity to be a powerful story. Um that's what we decided to stick we decided to stick to. So again, um I'm not the only one doing this work. Uh I think if we go all the way back to Wilburforce and so many of us have seen the the the Brooks um slave trading ship infographic, it's a famous example of like civic infographics. U most people have might have seen that which was about the part of the abolition movement. It was a major um uh campaign uh in the abolition movement in Britain. Most people don't know that they also made a sculpture of the ship to show the horrors of the slave trade and Wilbur Force who was one of the um the members of parliament in Britain every year would show up and like show this to his peers. So he was using a data sculpture back in the 1800s to try to tell this story which eventually led to the abolition of slavery. Um I think 2020 I like to talk about as like the year of data sculpture because again co it was like everything was related to that. We saw a ton of memorials like that the empty chair memorial um to talk about the number of people killed the number of people that died from COVID in a community. Um we still see these today uh that operates as a data sculpture for me. It's about the absence right that physical chair represents the person that is lost. And then we saw uh Cuomo who emerged at the time as a major um narrator of the COVID uh pandemic in the US on TV in absence of federal leadership. His daily updates became something a lot of people watched on TV. Um he built this it was panned at the time. It's like a science fair project, but he built this sculpture of a mountain, right? And the mountain was viewed from the front. It was a line chart, right? So read the outside as a line chart. um and over time and but it was like a physical thing that was bigger than these two tables and he was talking about climbing the COVID mountain that we can't climb this mountain again and that's why we need to to flatten the curve if you remember that narrative. Um this became his metaphor for multiple days he was using the physical metaphor of climbing a mountain which was a data metaphor that was a data sculpture for days as his primary narrative. So for me, that era saw a ton of people trying to take all of the data communication that was happening and experimenting with new ways to to to showcase it. And I saw a lot of sculptures happening. Okay. Uh so murals, sculptures, uh I want to talk about data theater. Each of these I'm trying to create experiments that push for that bigger toolbox and try to build an evidence base for the way that it operates that either complements existing methods or offers some new opportunities. Data theater is one of the newer more experimental ones that I'm working on and it's been a couple years but right now we have a lot of support which is really nice. Um, and I'm inspired by a certain way of thinking about learning and a way of thinking about uh how we have how we know things that comes out of Brazil. Like I was trained after I studied computer engineering, I then studied education. Um and and in that education studies I encountered the teachings of Po Fer and then I learned about the other Brazilians that he worked with including Austo Ba who invented all of these participatory theater mechanisms and that their way of thinking centers liberation and empowerment in a lot of the learning and education they do. So, as an example, if you're learning to read, uh it's not about just reading like a book. It's about reading the newspaper so that you can activate and fight for the things that matter in your community. Um usually our toolbox for telling data stories is built on things like this. So, here you have uh um Bertton's encodings, thinking about visuals, you know, changing the marks, changing the size of something, the scale. Um here you see the famous Hans Rosling uh change over time. We think about this as our toolbox for telling data stories. Um, and I think I'm really inspired by the way Alberto Cairo talks about having different dialects for data storytelling in his most recent book. And I think this is one dialect and for too long we focused on it as the correct one. Um, and in fact there's multiple different ways to speak with data. And so we decided to push that. So bringing together those two points, the idea of multiple dialects and the idea of learning from participatory theater, uh we wanted to play with what we talk about as an embodiment, representing a data story through the movement of your body in some way. Um and so we launched for a couple years I was experimenting with this and trying things out and then I ran into a bunch of amazing colleagues in the theater department at Nor Eastern where I teach. I'm in journalism and art and design. Those are the two departments I'm in. But I'm in a college of arts, media, and design. So, we have a theater department. And I met a bunch of these people who are starting to ask similar questions, which is great because I am not a theater person. That is not my normal language. I feel uncomfortable in those settings. But I really wanted to explore the question of how to do that. So then we started working with them and there's a there's a practice of researchbased theater that is related to this idea. Um so we said okay let's try to find some support for exploring the idea of data theater as civic for civic deliberation right so we have a big team of people and we got an amazing grant from uh the Melon Foundation is supporting this work if you want to see a little bit more about it there's a QR code there um so what does it mean data theater um we're experimenting with a method where we start with a small data set as source material as we say in the theater world um to devise a production to create a short play that is based on that data um that represents scenes in it, perform that and then have a facilitated dialogue afterwards. And we're wondering, we're hypothesizing that this opens the door for data conversations in civic settings, so in local government or things like that or in a local community that engage people that otherwise wouldn't show up at uh like an evening meeting that the city hosts. Uh so in the US that's pretty common. The we'll have like an evening meeting where the government will show a you know a PowerPoint presentation and then do Q&A. Um, and that form excludes a lot of people, including people that have kids that need to eat at dinnertime, people that work in the evening, people that can't make it there if they don't speak the language. It's just like it's a very um static form. Uh, so we're positing, oh, what if instead you took the same data, and we're working with data about Boston and gentrification and green space. Um, and you worked with a community group to devise a theatrical production, so a 20-minute play that represented the data and the stories in it in some way. And then you performed that in community settings. So, you perform it in the park that they near where they live. You take it around town, perform it at the local theater. And each time you perform it, you have a 15-minute facilitated discussion afterwards and you invite government to that. We're wondering if that shifts who's interested and who gets activated. And it's a research project, right? We have some ideas. We're trying them out. Our early evidence, we're doing initial workshops this summer with a bunch of youth groups um in the Boston area. Um it's producing pieces that look a little bit like this. This specific one was with a group in uh Chelsea, which is in east side of Boston. It's very susceptible to flooding. Um, so Boston is the coastal city with uh climate change and sea level rise. We have more mega storms, so it's flooded fairly often. Um, so we had a a two-page handout, so a tabloid 11 by7 handout with maps and charts and tables about flooding, uh, where the geographies of it and incidents of it. and we led a workshop with them with youth. This was uh mostly uh Latino youth, so it was in Spanish and English and parents and wanted to talk to them about that. And our this was super fun. It was a great collaboration. The the organization we worked with um called LA Collaborative does amazing work there in the community. And so they brought people that were interested and excited to play. Uh and they it was a group that were low self-assessed data ability. So when we asked them, hey, do you like how comfortable do you feel working with data? They said like really low. But then we asked them how important do you think working with data is to make change in your community? And all of them put their hands up really high. So they had a belief that this was important and impactful, but they didn't feel like they could do it. So then we did these exercises. We did a bunch of uh of data games and they ended up producing really powerful pieces that were uh image theater if you know it's basically putting your body into a static position to tell a story with no words or anything. That's uh that's what mostly we were doing. So you see on the top left you see um youth reenacting somebody driving by in a car in the chairs and you see someone holding a steering wheel and splashing the kids on the sidewalk. Right. Many of you experienced this yesterday morning when cars drove along and splashed. I certainly got splashed. That happens to them every time it rains. And that pissed the parents off. They were like, "Oh my god, my kid is showing up to school soaked and cold and they're going to get sick." The students were they the parents were super upset about that. Um, here you see uh in the top right you see basically like a a story that was almost like um ref like uh climate refugees like people that were stuck out in the rain trying to get in but somebody not letting them in to get out of the rain. Um and on the bottom left you see people trying to when we shifted to solutions after we were talking about problems we shifted to creating images of solutions to do uh civic imagination. Um, so they were talking about cleaning out the gutters, right? So the gutters get stuck with leaves and paper and trash and then the water doesn't drain into the into the sewer system. So they were they were acting out cleaning out the gutters and to provoke a conversation about oh can people like adopt a gutter and clean it out during the storm that's on their street or can they hire more people? So people had uh relatives that worked in the sanitation department and they all they were sharing that uh that they don't have enough staff. So could we get more money to hire more people to clear out those gutters? Um and then you see some of the people uh like looking at the data handouts. So they created these scenes and we were just experimenting with facilitation techniques um with them. Um and the early results were we saw a willingness to do stuff with their body, right? So like I feel really shy with my body in that way, but this crowd they were they were willing to try stuff out and like you know put themselves in wacky positions acting out scenes. Um so that was great. Uh we there were a bunch of comments about how people had never seen the data in a way they understood before that they're like oh yeah I went to this thing once about flooding but I never understood it now I understand it. Um through these activities they got to know the data. Um and uh so it made it more legible. We saw groups that don't often talk to each other talking to each other like parents and kids were working together and many of us know how challenging that can be. So we saw some like uh community cohesion like a little bit of strength in that potentially. Um and then uh we had some challenges around like documentation or facilitation. We learned a bunch from we did a series of four workshops, but we're trying this stuff out to build an evidence base around multiple methods for a bigger toolbox, right? And trying to show how it can be effective again to complement, but also like we want to do comparisons, right? Show a similar group of people just a PowerPoint presentation of the same data and then try to compare what they walk away with and their willingness to work on that problem, right? We're not there yet, but we want to get there. Again, this builds on work that a lot of people are doing. Um, so certainly I mentioned the theater of the press stuff that inspires the work. Um, and then there's a couple of really powerful examples of this kind of performance. Um, uh, so, uh, you can't read the top one is a sort of joy. 100% city is definitely inspiring. And then, uh, in Pueba at the last conference, I talked about the back nine, which was a, um, a theatrical piece and a mini golf course, which I love. that were based on data that were created by the only uh theatrical troop that's made up completely of unhoused people um in the US and that was the Los Angeles poverty department. So there's lots of other interesting work happening there. So that one we have less evidence for but we're still playing with it and experimenting with it to try to again create that bigger toolbox. that one data theater focuses on this question of embodiment. Um, so the last one I want to talk about is data music and I specifically don't say sonification because I think sonification it's a useful word but it it just like it rings very much of an analog to visualization where visualization like it has sort of just a lot of baggage and weight about what correct ways to do it are and I worry that sonification sort of brings that baggage with it. So um I want to talk a bit about data music. Um and here I did an experiment on climate change communication. So climate change many of you have done this work. Climate change communication is really hard uh for a lot of reasons. U here's the classic uh hockey stick graph. Um and there's been study after study about why it's so challenging in the US and in other places. But I wanted to say like can we make it fun in some way? Um, so can we like shift the just the assumptions of the communication a little bit so it doesn't feel like oh personal responsibility or like change isn't possible but can we just make the whole thing more fun and see if that activates people differently. So I worked with I play in a in a big Brazilian drum troop. So a bloco like if you've seen videos of Rio there's like you know 100 drummers walking down the street. I play in a small version of those. Um so like we usually have like 20 drummers walking down the street because that's what you can get in Boston when you're not in Rio. Um so uh and that's led by Marcus Santos who's on the left there. Um we dove into um climate emissions in India, Brazil and the US right each a country that is very different in terms of their climate profile but also a country that has very strong rhythmic traditions and drumming that are very recognizable and very um uh and ones that we can work with. and we brainstormed a bunch and we ended up putting a on a show uh and the show was a short performance where I kind of played this professor that's me in my like best professor jacket um where I was trying to like give a lecture and my lecture about climate change kept getting interrupted by this band. It's sort of the narrative of the show. Um, if you see where did I put the Oh, yeah. If you go to this QR code, you can like read the story, a little bit of it. But, um, uh, we kept getting I keep getting interrupted by this band that's annoying me. And then eventually we decided to work together and the whole story is about working together. Um, and all of the rhythms that they're playing are built on top of climate emissions, right? Mapped onto uh, rhythms playing counter against each other with syncopation, volume, all different elements of drumming. You can see some of that here where we are playing across um there's uh traditionally like five lines in one of these troops of uh raik which is like the da and the snare drum the kaisha and then three different types of fundos the big round ones that go boom boom. So you can see that group here across the bottom playing um that was our inaugural performance. I'm trying to book a couple more of these performances to sort of like flesh it out. That felt like a dress rehearsal um that performance. So I feel like now we got one under our belt and now we can do a little better. Um and the initial feedback uh related to people just feeling really feeling the emissions, right? So when these drums play like you can feel it. We're loud and you literally feel it in your bones. And just like with theater, the embodying of the data, we saw evidence that that changed how people connected to the actual people represented in the data, right? It created empathy in a way that happened differently with this data performance with this music. It sort of comes at you in a different way. It helps you experience the knowledge in a different way. And there's a bunch of theories of like how we learn things, but this one operates slightly differently. Um, and you could read into it and try to understand the rhythms and the encodings a bit more. Um, or you could just enjoy the piece overall and be like, "Oh, that was a fun drawn performance. Um, they kept interrupting that dude with the jacket." Um, so it allows for layers of understanding. You don't have to sit there and like take the whole thing seriously. You could just enjoy the drum show and then go off and be like, "Oh, oh, was it about climate?" Okay. So, you can have those different experiences. Um, which I think meets people where they are or are ready to be and offers them a doorway in to more knowledge. Um, okay. So, part of that is like an argument about how we live in a multiensory world and we tend to focus on the visual. Um, and you know, the sculptures focus a little bit more on demand, but I think there's way more we can work with. Um, and I love the experiments in this domain with people working on whatever the hell you want to call those things, but things that explore the multiensory facets. So, I'm that's part of my my my motivation. Um, you see here like a smell map of Milan. You see the famous work from Dana Cuisine. You see sonification tools. There's people playing with that. um which I find very inspirational. So all of that together I talk about in the book as popular data. So the idea that we're that we're helping activate people in community settings to be engaged and create change by using data as a mirror, right? To reflect what they're working on and what they're experiencing. Um I have like underlying theory where I talk about like what the motivations are um to get into these examples. In this talk, I tried to focus on the concrete application, but um there is sort of a framework that tries to help people get there underneath. If you're curious about that, check out the book. There's a website there that you can check out. It's just communitydabbook.com. Um you can find it at your library or online or on your ebooks or whatever. Um and so that's that's that's it for the topic. I want to do three shoutouts to things that are coming up that are related and then I think I'll pause for questions. Um so, uh three shoutouts. Uh, one, I'm going to do a data sculpture activity later today. I think we're going to close with it. So, I walked around the markets yesterday and went to the the Euro store, I guess, the dollar store. Got a bunch of supplies. I've got a little hand out about ice cream and some other stuff. So, if you want to try making a data sculpture quickly to feel out feel out what that feels like, we'll do it later today. Perfect. Great. So, reload the agenda and you'll see it. Um, number two, uh, Margo mentioned the computation plus journalism symposium. This year, Abato Cairo is hosting at Miami. So if you're interested or free to come to Miami in December, it's a great gathering of journalists, industry, and academia. So that's the second conference. Um and then the third conference is we're hosting Info Plus, which happens every two years, which is a gathering of researchers, educators, practitioners, all in information design and data visualization. So that's happening in Boston at MIT and Northeastern in uh November. I guess I should have flipped those. That one's next and then that one happens after. So, those are upcoming events that I thought might be interesting to the crowd here uh to check out. Um, but with that, I think I'll close uh and take some time for questions. That's one of my design goals. So, I appreciate that. >> Thank you, Ro. We need more of these everywhere. But talking to that um know we work with some local news organizations WNYC for instance in New York City and the thing is they do this data journalism stories that are a snapshot in time and then the following week it's gone. Can how can you have like this almost like what do what I think there's a term for it like green field stories that maybe it keeps getting updated with data. We did an experiment with vision zero in New York City for instance where the then mayor had a vision zero perspective and WNYC did reporting on it about all the kids who died on all these accidents and we visualize it on a map but then you know the grant ran out and the the story stopped getting told. >> Yeah. >> So yeah >> that's a great question. So like I don't I don't think these are going to fix the news cycle, right? The news cycle is what it is are it's built on our attention spans where like a story creates a splash and then falls out. Like I don't think it's going to change that. That said, what I'm pitching for and I was talking with Chris and some others yesterday about this about I think that I I I'm in a journalism department and I work with a lot of news rooms. I'm trying to convince some to to as they think about their story, their data story specifically as a product, right? that they they publish on their website, they push out on social, like can we also have a version of that story that is like creates a public experience in the main square during lunchtime on a Monday or something, you know? So, can we do a little activity that that brings it into space and connects with people in a different way like with their readers, their audience, and reinforces that trust loop, right? One thing we've seen in participatory journalism is those face-to-face interactions reinforce trust at a time where those journalists like are suffering from a lack of trust. So I don't think like the it's going to solve the persistence problem. You have to come up with a new version of that story every n months. That I think is there. But maybe you don't have to come up with a new version of the story. Maybe you need to come up with a new media to tell the story in. Right? So maybe you know you have your visualization or your database on the website and then you have like a schedule over three months where you roll it out. Um and a lot of people are doing that thinking in digital publishing where you do like a pipeline of story of like reader capture where you start with social teasing and then you pull someone into like an introduction that's a biography and then you have a second story that's an explainer and then the third story that's an investigation. So you create this pipeline of like a two-month arc. So people are doing that type of production on a narrative. I just want to see some of this type of public space version in real life as part of it. >> Thank you for your talk and I was wondering if you can spend uh a little bit more words on the deliberative part of the theater. >> Sure. Um I'm happy to and my colleague Michael Arnold Arnold Majes is like a deliberation expert. So we have a member of the team who's focused on that. Um so uh I'm going to give you a half answer because that that's next year. Right now we're doing experiments about the facilitation and the production. We're doing a production at Nor Eastern this fall that works on like how to bring data to life. Um and then next year is when we build a piece about the issue and take it and start doing the deliberation. That said, um, in theater, there are two specific things we can learn from. One is that pedagogy of the oppressed, uh, that, uh, sorry, the theater of the oppressed practices where if you, often you're re you will reenact or like make, uh, make light of some civic something that's happening and then you'll stop and you'll invite the audience in to to change the scene, right? To do something and and then that changes how it plays out. So that that mechanism that technique is one that is a form of of building uh civic potential right the belief that you can change things. Um and that's a form I think of the deliberation that we don't usually think of when we use that word. The second one is like in the US very often like ra you know this sort of like every once in a while we have a play that's about racism and like racism is a thing that like we always talk about in the US because we haven't gotten over it and then you'll have like a facilitated discussion afterwards. So the idea of doing of having a play and then doing like setting up like you know eight person tables and having a facilitator at each table the with a with a like a question guide to get people talking to each other. Um, that's another thing that we learned from in the world of theater. Um, and then there's all the work in urban planning around participatory design, right? The sticky notes and the writing on maps, all that stuff. I think Michael is going to be lead on that piece of the project. I think he's going to synthesize from those to come up with something that makes sense for us, but I'm curious to see what it is. And I would happy to answer that question in a year. Sorry. Yeah. Next time. H thank you for the talk. I want to thank you because you made me rethink something that happened in my country in Argentina which is a way of community data that I want I want to share. When a person dies in a a car accident in the road in Argentina, maybe in another places they do it too, they paint just in the street a a yellow star, >> a big yellow star. So for drivers every time we go go for that places we realize that maybe this is a dangerous place and you need to drive carefully and also for the people and every and with the pass of time start h start losing the color and someone someone repaint it. I assume it's the family of the person I don't know but I found it that's a really good example of of how community data help us. I when we drive for for the street and see this start we think a lot of that and we start driving carefully and this I I connect that with do your talk and I think it's a beautiful example and thank you >> thank you for sharing that that's a that's a beautiful example of a memory um and I think uh in the US where I live in Boston um we have we have a version of that for bicycle deaths where they put a white bicycle and they sort of chain it to a pole next to where a bicyclist was killed um it serves in a similar way but that's a wonderful example. Thank you in front here. >> Hi. um from uh I I come from a few experiences on public history uh done with uh role playing games and I see a lot of similarities on that because we tried to work on multi-table role playing games where the tables represented various groups that were interest had different interests so that the players had to uh really um perceive that position in a different historic toal moment or in a different historical situation. So I see a lot of uh points in common with from in our experience and your experience in theater and uh so my question was have you ever thought of trying with role playing and >> that's a great example. Um, so I tend to talk about those as participatory simulations because there's a practice of that that the pieces I know are in public health where they're like you'll model a health access system and people will play different roles in it and then you'll have to experience it and then all of the stakeholders talk about the experience. It's not the same but um it's similar to what you're saying. I think I've I've lessons to learn from those. Um that said in the theater examples they have a creative license that isn't there in participatory sim simulations um that that I think are is is one of the things we're teasing out. So we did these workshops over the summer with youth groups across Boston on issues from um uh from like public health uh to reproductive rights to like ICE and immigration rates to flooding. And we learned a ton about like what people what people dig into and how what methods work. So now we're sort of going a little bit internal and we're doing a production in the fall that is about like people representing data in theatrical ways to explore that space. Then people these are people that are either theater professionals or theater students. So we're trying to build the space of like what's possible in theater and then we're going to mash those two together next year. So I think I want to think about the participatory simulations and those types of role playinging as we get to the mashing up. Um I think that's a great reminder. Thank you for that. >> Thank you for your presentation. I follow the the last year presentation. It was very interesting. My question is how we can start doing the same thing for example in Italy for data theater data sculpture because we don't I don't know we have a lot of initiatives like that but my question is your personal advice your personal experience >> on how to start the kind of fish in Italy for example but also in other countries >> so I think the first when I'm talking to people about like starting up to sort of build their toolbox in their community or in their practice themselves. I start by finding people that are already doing the things. So for instance, the the data sculpture, there are tons of artists using data as material. Now um if you look at uh the what is it called the making data book or the making Samuel Hiron and the rest of them's book making shoot I forget what it's called. Maybe it's called making data. Anyway, I'll look up the name of it. But they have tons of examples of artists from you know knitts to painters to mosaicists that are doing data work. So I would start by looking for the artists that are using data as material and then say hey do you want to do something together that is like about our community you know not like some of them are doing very personal things like you know like knitting uh knitting a scarf out of their sleeping patterns how many hours of sleep they got each night. I'm like, that's great, but you could convince an artist that's doing that type of work to do something that is relevant for the community as well. So, I start with that. Um, the second is finding the groups that are willing to experiment. So, here in our practice, we found a community group that was willing to try something wacky. It was a local arts community group. They had a theater troop already and they were able to So, we're looking for the ones that are almost there and then I try to come in and push them a little further. In journalism, I'm looking for the ones that are doing the data storytelling that want to try out an experiment, right? That want to So, it's always about like who are the people that are close? Can I push them a little further to work together? That's my strategy. I don't know. But, >> thank you. >> It also the point for me is that it reinforces the connections. Like all of this work is collaborative. So, it's community work. So, I think sometimes the goal of our murals is not the mural. It's the group of people in the room that work together for the next five years, right? And that's true of probably half of our murals. Maybe the m some of the murals are painted over already two years later. So only sometimes is the output like the artifact the goal because it's community work. Sometimes the goal is building the the connections in the community and the data is a way to bring people together to reinforce that. >> Okay. Okay. All right. >> This is going to be tricky. >> Yeah, that was fantastic. Thank you. I'm a bit overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings, so I'm going to have to be quick. Um I was wondering if some of the work and the research you do also taps into um repairing relationships with indigenous communities through data and data restitution and rematriation and that sort of things that it's definitely needed in the way we do research. Yeah. >> The western part of the world that's something that interests you and >> yeah it's a great provocation. So I learn a lot from indigenous data principles. Um there's a couple of different frameworks that indigenous folks have pioneered that are mostly related to like uh data rights um and uh and boundaries and ownership. Um I haven't seen that many examples of sort of the creative work on data representation coming from indigenous communities. I think I need to look harder, right? I'm constantly looking. So I'd love if you've seen some I would love send them my way. Wonderful. I love like there was an example yesterday in one of the talks of of assonification. I love learning from those examples. And part of my goal and like if I put on my professor hat, you know, part of my goal as like a professor is to try to amplify examples that are not part of the canonical set, right? So a lot of what I'm doing in the book is like I'm giving examples and I did a bunch of interviews of projects from around the world with things that you might not think of as data storytelling, but because like Professor Barov says they are in a book, maybe they count now. So I love trying to like uphold those examples, say look what we can learn from here. So I would love to see more. Um and I've I've worked with some indigenous communities in like library settings um around around data stuff, but I haven't had a chance to to learn from more. So that's a big open open book for me. >> Thanks everybody. >> Yeah. Thank you.