What (else) can images do for DH? - PowerPoint Presentation

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What (else) can images do for DH? On shaming, critique, and beauty

Bettina BerendtDepartment of Computer ScienceKU Leuven, Belgiumhttp://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~bettina.berendt/HamburgJune 2nd, 2016

‹#›

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Who am I? (For the purposes of this talk)Currently Professor of Computer Science @ Leuven, Belgium

Formerly also Economics, Business Studies, Information Systems, Computer Uses in Education, PhD in Cognitive Science (U. Hamburg)RA in Computational Visualistics (U. Magdeburg)Now teaching in a Masters in DH2

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Images (aka

visualisations

)

for DH:

Some basics

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Accessible, easy, beautiful

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Some of the things we all know about Do‘s and dont‘s in visualisation

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Use the right visual variables

6time obviously, not a good visualisation of “rising fuel economy“

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Beware of the lie factor(from Tufte, 1983)

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Keep the communicative intent in mind(from Tufte, 1997)

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Why use images?

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What we know about the learning effectiveness of images

Levin, Anglin, & Carney (1987)10

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Representational images

... Tell the same story as the text... Make the text content more concrete

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Organisational images

... Make the text content more coherent... Often use spatial relations

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Interpretational images... Make the text more comprehensible

... Abstract concepts inside the text

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Transformational images...

Recode the central, to-be-learned information in a more concrete and better memorable form

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Beautiful hairballs(with thanks to Geoffrey Rockwell for the term)

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A constructivist speculation about the learning effectiveness of images

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Images that

you critique

Images that

you build

<<<<< Reflection >>>>>

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Constructivism (when it comes to images) in DH?Do you have to know how to code to be a DHer?

Coding vs. (only) reading and critiquing“Coding“ or (weaker?!) “building““Who‘s In and Who‘s Out“Stephan Ramsay at (resp. after) 2011 Modern Languages Association Convention 18See Gold (Ed.) (2012)

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CritiqueBuildingData visualisations1. Case study2. Drucker, 3DH

System visualisations

3.

4.

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CritiqueBuildingData visualisations1. Case study2. Drucker, 3DH

System visualisations

3.

4.

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Neighbourhood scoreboards

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What is this?

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Neighbourhood Scoreboards: Goals and media choice(all quotes from http://neighbourhoodscoreboards.com

/)Exposing residential energy consumption to encourage neighbourhood competition and behaviour change The Neighbourhood Scoreboard project investigates the effect of public exposure of domestic energy usage on house facades. The research project started in 2009 and was carried out at the Design Lab, University of Sydney.From October to November 2010 five chalkboards as feedback displays were installed in a Sydney neighbourhood and manually updated each day. […] Chalkboard was the material choice because it does not require any energy, is easily updated and maintained, low-cost in production and we found the aesthetics to match nicely the existing architectural typology.

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Building

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In what sense(s) could it be regarded as a DH project?

(note that this is already an interpretation of course)26

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Neighbourhood scoreboards: Information design

Energy usage depends on many factors, such as the number of people living in the household, the inhabitable surface area, the type of appliances used, whether gas or electricity is used for heating, and so on. The display therefore shows change in energy consumption over a specific period of time. This also provides for a certain degree of public privacy: communicating "no, or little change" conveys a different meaning from "no, or little usage", for instance in the case when a household is absent for a long period of time. To ensure people were able to relate their recent decisions and activities to the actual performance shown on the displays, we preferred to compare daily (vs. weekly) energy usage. In order to provide a more detailed view of the energy usage patterns in multiple visual ways, we used a combination of graphical and textual visualisations: change in electricity consumption compared to the previous day, a historical graph that allowed to compare between weeks, a pictorial bar showing rewards for sustained change in the form of smiley faces, and a daily ranking between participating neighbours.

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Is this a topic for (digital) humanists?Bethany

Nowviskie 2014 Keynote at DH Conference: digital humanities in the anthropocene» the digital humanities is uniquely positioned to address the ecological concerns of climate change. […] the humanities has a duty to model critically-informed approaches to interpret the vague and numerically-driven climate visualizations presented to the public, including their otherwise “unimpressionable risks” « (Starling Gould, 2015)28

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Is this a topic for the arts?

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What is good about this?

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Neighbourhood scoreboards: study and results

The public display was installed on the facade of five houses and the display was manually updated on a daily basis for the entire study period. Households were also provided with a common electricity monitor, embedded in a custom-made blackboard to entice the trust that the information shown on the public display was based on continuous and accurate measurements.The energy performance of the five houses equipped with public displays was compared to two control groups: The first control group consisted of three households that received a common electricity monitor. The second group consisted of three households, for which we measured the electricity consumption during the study period, but without giving participants access to this information. The quantitative measurements showed that households that received a public display decreased their energy usage on average by 2.5% per week compared to a decrease of 1.0% per week in the control group with common electricity monitor and 0.5% per week in the control group with no feedback. The presence of a public display further led to a more sustained conservation behaviour compared to only having access to private feedback. Interviews with participants confirmed the effect of the

competitive neighbourhood ranking as being ideal for initiating behaviour change

, but also

revealed

several unexpected side effects (e.g. clustering energy-intensive activities to specific strategic times) and suggestions for improvement

.

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What is questionable about this?

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Critiquing

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Data reductionism; lack of context?What kind of energy (coal, nuclear, renewable)?

Household with a bed-ridden person who needs a warm room?Passive house of the CEO of a brown-coal power station?If we factor in such data, what could be the collatoral damage?34

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“Data speak for themselves.““With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves

.”Anderson, C. (2008). “Quantitative data [...] are independent of interpretation; [...] they often demand an interpretation that transcends the quantitative realm.“Moretti, F. (2007), p.3035

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Data?datum = given

“data refer to those elements that are taken [abstracted from phenomena]: extracted through observations, computations, experiments, and record keeping”, “selected from nature by the scientist in accordance with his [sic] purpose” (Kitchin, 2014; see also Drucker, 2011) Capta!36

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Impact of measure-ment methods

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The politics of “consumer choice““The political appears to be a thing that either says ‘You can do anything you want‘ or ‘You can‘t have what you want because it is going to be legislated for‘

and the thing that is going ‘No, no, no, we‘re not going to tell people what they can or can‘t have; what we are going to do is we‘re just going to give them information so that they can make an informed choice‘ - that sounds very non-political, but of course it is highly political; it is simply a politics that is a very free market, liberal, globalized politics where everything is consumption choice.“(cited from an interview, Jones et al. (2013), p. 153)38

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Scratching the surface rather than examining the underlying values?

Social norms of cleanliness, comfort, ...39

See Jones et al. (2013)

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Effectiveness / Leverage? (1)Mental Accounting (Thaler, 1999) / Rebound effects

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Effectiveness/Leverage? (2)41

Energy consumed @Google for 1 query ~ powering a 60W lightbulb for 17 seconds

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Social practices have a history: Public information visualization of socially undesirable behaviour (1)

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2 Samuel 10:4

434So Hanun took David's servants and shaved off half of their beards, and cut off their garments in the middle as far as their hips, and sent them away. 5When they told it to David, he sent to meet them, for the men were greatly humiliated. And the king said, "Stay at Jericho until your beards grow, and then return."…

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Public visualization of socially undesirable behaviour (2): Using textual and numerical data

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I am arace desecratorJew J. RosenbergRing Street 48

I, blond angel,

s

lept at this

Jewish scoundrel‘s

Elisabeth Makourak

Franz Solde Street 76

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I am arace defilerJew J. RosenbergRing Street 48

I, blond angel,

s

lept at* this

Jewish scoundrel

‘s

Elisabeth Makourak

Franz Solde Street 76

* „bei“ (“at“) is unusual and coy:

What is meant is: I slept with this man.

(„schlief mit“)

In the original,

t

hese rhyme

w

ith each other

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Public visualization of socially undesirable behaviour (3): on buildings

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Germans!Resist!Don‘t buy from/in the shops of Jews!

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Germans!Resist!Don‘t buy from/in the shops of* Jews!* Literally: “don‘t buy at Jews“.The German expression „bei jemandem kaufen“

(= “buy at someone“) is the default expression,

a

nd it is emotionally neutral.

In the present context, the spatial connotation

is interesting: „bei“ (“at“) identifies both the

s

hop owner and the store location.

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Public visualization of socially undesirable behaviour (4): Using information visualization

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Impenitent heretic

Converted heretic

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“For being born somewhere else”

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Pillories, stocks, & Co.

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Visualisation and reflection?53

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Shaming the powerful (rather than individuals) - companies

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Shaming the powerful - governments (and the public)

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But you see my film is not a political film, the issue is political. Mine is a film about sensations, it's a film about emotions, it's a film about encounters, it's a film about people and their small stories.

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How to motivate?(“Catastrophe scenarios don‘t work.“ H. Welzer)

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What kind of pictures make you think?

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What does this have to do with DH research methods? (1)

The point of these ruminations was not to condemn the neighbourhood scoreboards project, let alone shame the researchers In fact, I am extremely grateful to them for making me think!(Besides, it is possible that the method is effective in some conditions.)Personal note (positioning of the researcher!):I don‘t think this gamification/shaming combination is a good idea.But then, I‘m old and not into gamification.And I‘m German.The researchers and the field-study participants are Flemish/Australian.Flanders has a different history regarding anti-semitism than Germany.Flemish mainstream culture has a different way of dealing with its history than German mainstream culture.

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What does this have to do with DH research methods? (2)

The point is to see DH as an opportunity:We are asked to do applied projects, and these invariably affect people and people‘s emotions. We therefore better think about what we‘re doing.With a perspective of critical data science (which I consider an essential part of DH), we know about the issues in the interpretation of data.As behavioural scientists, we know about the importance of emotions .e.g. shame: one of the most powerful emotions; what about, e.g., perception of beauty and empathy? As social scientists, we know about power and social practices.As historians, we know about the history of social practices.As literary scholars, we have seen all these issues discussed in novels etc.As text scholars, we are used to applying close reading.As philosophers and humanists, we care about ethics.As Digital Humanists, by doing such

thinking-through

we have the unique chance of bringing all this knowledge to bear on creating humane and effective real-world artefacts!

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Building

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CritiqueBuildingData visualisations1. Case study2. Drucker, 3DH

System visualisations

3.

4.

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Emphasizing capta qualities: constructedness, uncertainty, ambiguity, relationality, interpretation(from Drucker, 2011)

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Classical information visualization: realism, “objective data“

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DH in context

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Abuses of the humanistic stance?!67

“Laws of nature are not negotiable“ (Wiegandt, 2014) An interdisciplinary challenge that needs a collaboration of different scientific “styles“ (including communication and visualisation styles)!

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Neutrality vs. objectivity?!68

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What is your story?69

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What is science for in the end?How do we want to live?

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Summary and outlook71

CritiqueBuildingData visualisations1. Case study2. Drucker, 3DH

System visualisations

3.

Information wants to be free: Thinking-through Respect by Design

(with

G. Rockwell) – talk at the Göttingen Dialogue in DH, upcoming paper)

4. Future

work!

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Thank you!

I‘ll be more than happy to hear your s?

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References73

Bertin, J. (1967|1983). Semiology of graphics: Diagrams, networks, maps. Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press.Tufte, E.R. (1983). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Cheshire, CT: Graphics

Press.

Tufte, E.R.

(1997).

Visual

Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and

Narrative.

Cheshire, CT: Graphics

Press.

Levin, J.R., Anglin, G.J., & Carney, R.N. (1987). On

empirically

validating functions

of pictures in prose, in:

D.M. Willows

&

H.A. Houghton (Eds.),

The Psychology of

Illustration. Vol.1: Basic

Research

(pp. 1-50). New York: Springer.Gold, M.K. (Ed.) (2012). Debates in the Digital

Humanities. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates Nowviskie, B. (2014). digital

humanities in the anthropocene. http://nowviskie.org/2014/anthropocene/

Starling Gould, A. (2015).

Anthropocene

Digital Humanities: A MLA 2017

Proposal.

https

://amandastarlinggould.com/anthropocenedh

/

Anderson, C. (2008). The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete.

Wired 16.07.

Available at

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/anderson08/anderson08_index.html

Moretti

, F. (2005).

Graphs, Maps, Trees. Abstract Models for Literary History.

London: Verso (cited from the paperback published in 2007)

Kitchin

, R. (2014a).

The Data Revolution. Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences.

London: Sage.

Jones

, R.,

Pykett

, J., & Whitehead, M. (2013).

Changing Behaviours. On the Rise of the Psychological State.

Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Thaler

, R.H. (1999). Mental accounting matters.

Journal of

Behavioral

Decision Making, 12 (3),

183–206

.

Drucker, J

. (2011).

Humanities Approaches to Graphical

Display.

Digital

Humanities Quarterly, 5(1).

http://

www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html

Wiegandt, K. (2014). Hindernisse auf dem Weg zu einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung.

In H

. Welzer & K. Wiegandt (Eds.),

Wege

aus der

Wachstumsgesellschaft

(

pp. 60-89

). Frankfurt

am Main, Germany: S. Fischer Verlag.

Rockwell, G. & Berendt, B. (2016 / forthcoming).

Information wants to be free: Thinking-through Respect by Design.

Göttingen

Dialog for Digital Humanities. University of

Göttingen

. 9 May 2106.

http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~

bettina.berendt/Talks/rockwell_berendt_2016_05_09.pdf /

forthcoming paper

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More sourcesPlease find the URLs of pictures and screenshots in the Powerpoint “comment“ box

Thanks to all authors and the Internet!74