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Record W4245885544 · doi:10.14361/dcs-2019-0104

Accounting for Visual Bias in Tangible Data Design

2019· article· en· W4245885544 on OpenAlex
Gabby Resch

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueDigital Culture & Society · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicData Visualization and Analytics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCitizen journalismComputer scienceCitizenshipCitizen scienceCivic engagementData scienceRepresentation (politics)LiteracyOpen dataPublic relationsSociologyWorld Wide WebPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Data engagement has become an important facet of engaged citizenship. While this is celebrated by those who advocate for expanding participatory channels in civic experience, others have rightfully expressed concern about the complicated dimensions of balancing access with data literacy. If engaged citizenship increasingly requires the ability to interpret civic data through city dashboards and open data portals, then there is a concomitant requirement for diverse populations to develop critical perspectives on data representation (what is commonly referred to as data visualisation, information graphics, etc.). Effective data representations are used to ground conversations, communicate policy ideas and substantiate arguments about important civic issues, but they are also frequently used to deceive and mislead. Expanding statistical, graphical, digital and media literacy is a necessary component of fostering a critical data culture, but who are the beneficiaries of expanded models of literacy and modes of civic engagement? Which communities are invalidated in the design of civic data interfaces? In this article, I summarise the results of a design study undertaken to inform the development of accessible data representation techniques. In this study, I conducted fourteen 2-h participatory design-inspired interview sessions with blind and visually impaired citizens. These sessions, in which I iteratively developed new physical data objects and assessed their interpretability, leveraged a public transit dataset made available by the City of Toronto through its open data portal. While ostensibly “open,” this dataset was initially published in a format that was exclusively visual, excluding blind and visually impaired citizens from engaging with it. What I discovered through the study was that the process of translating 2D, screen-based civic dashboards and data visualisations into tangible objects has the capacity to reintroduce visual biases in ways that data designers may not generally be aware of.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.903
Threshold uncertainty score0.878

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.003
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.090
GPT teacher head0.342
Teacher spread0.252 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it