This work was initially funded through a Forming Teams SEED grant from Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology. A summary of our proposal is below. The current exhibition is funded by the Price Gilbert Foundation.
Project Motivation
Many datasets collected and maintained by municipal and private agencies in and around the city of Atlanta, including Georgia Tech, are publicly available yet are difficult for the public to access and engage with in a fun and meaningful way. For one, people must actively seek out datasets (such as data on climate, education statistics, traffic, consumer goods, nutrition), which requires awareness of the research or resource in order to search for it. Moreover, much published research data is targeted for peers in the scientific community rather than public-facing representations. Given past research showing that many people have trouble interpreting graphs of unfamiliar data (Ma et al., 2019) and may lack motivation to interact with data (Cafaro & Roberts, 2021), particularly if they can’t find personal connections to it (Peck et al., 2017), specific attention must be paid to present data for public consumption.
An interactive museum whose mission it is to connect the public to scientific research through human-data interactions can take steps toward tackling these challenges. We propose to build a team to lay the groundwork for creating the “Datasium” at Georgia Tech We envision this data-centered museum space as serving two key functions: 1) Amplifying Georgia Tech’s visibility, reputation, and image in Atlanta for both visitors and Altantans by leveraging its unique assets of its centrally-located and walkable Midtown campus and its state-of-the-art scientific research; 2) Operating as a living research lab for research efforts in information visualization and learning sciences that are already underway at Georgia Tech.
Community Outreach Opportunity
Georgia Tech’s prime campus location in Midtown draws pedestrian traffic year round, yet many labs and buildings are inaccessible to the public. We see an opportunity to produce a street-visible, learning-oriented destination that showcases the Institute and creates memorable experiences that will amplify Tech’s reputation as a technology and research innovation hub. Increasing visibility of our research can simultaneously create new partnerships with data stakeholders in the Atlanta region and address prevalent misunderstandings about the role scientific research plays in the world. GT can serve as a bridge that helps the public confidently engage with data and become more data literate though friendly, accessible, curated exhibits. We seek SEED funding to help us develop a plan for the vision of this space, from overarching data themes to be presented (e.g. transportation, environmental data), to the specific types of exhibits that will be displayed (tangible data, visual pattern recognition, tracking movement patterns, making thematic maps, etc.) by engaging with stakeholders within Georgia Tech, Midtown, and the Atlanta area.
Scientific Research Opportunity
Human-data interaction (HDI) is a growing subfield spanning multiple domains, dealing broadly with “human manipulation and sensemaking of big and complex datasets” (Victorelli et al., 2020). Many questions remain about how to design interactions that bridge highly specialized scientific knowledge for the lay public. The Dataseum will advance our current research agenda for enhancing scholarship in Learning Sciences and Technology at Georgia Tech, by providing a living laboratory on campus as a space for iterative, design-based research addressing public engagement with science and scientific data. Access to a public-facing research space will add value to prospective faculty and students in visualization, media design, GIS, and the learning sciences. This proposed project will help us plan research opportunities and engage faculty whose research labs would benefit from the Dataseum space.
References
Cafaro, F., & Roberts, J. (2021). Data through Movement: Designing Embodied Human-Data Interaction for Informal Learning. Synthesis Lectures on Visualization, 8(3), 1-127.
Ma, J., Ma, K. L., & Frazier, J. (2019). Decoding a complex visualization in a science museum–an empirical study. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 26(1), 472-481.
Peck, E. M., Ayuso, S. E., & El-Etr, O. (2019, May). Data is personal: Attitudes and perceptions of data visualization in rural pennsylvania. In Proceedings of the CHI 2019 (pp. 1-12).
Victorelli, E. Z., & Reis, J. C. D. (2020, October). Human-data interaction design guidelines for visualization systems. In Proceedings of the 19th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-10).