Data Epics
While data is often perceived as objective, many scholars in Science and Technology Studies argue that data can be biased, incomplete, messy, and lively. Using short stories, we attempted to creatively interpret data from home IoT in ways that explore data’s liveliness, its entanglement in life, its qualities, and how people think about data. We discover a new way of working in a small group of interlocutors as well as a new set of imaginaries around data.
A reader holding a short story that a fiction writer wrote based on an anonymous home dweller’s home IoT data.
Publications:
"Data Epics: Embarking on Literary Journeys of Home Internet of Things Data."
Desjardins, Audrey, and Heidi R. Biggs. "Data Epics: Embarking on Literary Journeys of Home Internet of Things Data." In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-17. 2021.
Project Description:
In this project, we took data from a trusted research collaborator who is an IoT enthusiast and gave it anonymously to a fiction writer who then translated the data into short stories. The data came from different devices such as smart plugs, motion detectors and voice assistants. We cleaned and prepared the data before handing it over to the fiction writer. We then turned the short stories into booklets to give back to the data-owner so that they could experience their data in a fictional context. After four rounds of this exchange, we reviewed themes and patterns we found both in how data was represented in fiction and how we all worked together as a team in different roles to interpret data and craft the epics.
Depiction of the process of data epics being made.
Findings:
Through the fiction itself, we saw the author create new worlds where data ‘lives’ and they thoroughly explored life from the perspective of IoT devices that gather data. They also explored how data entwines with other things and beings, illustrating the concept of a data assemblage. They also imbued their texts with complex issues like power dynamics and control and surveillance issues.
We also observed the labor of crafting data; finding that at every single step of our process we were deciding what data was collected and the quality and nature of that data, how the data was displayed, and how we crafted the books themselves. We also explored the process our author took to write the epics and the reactions of our data-providing research collaborator when they read the stories.
Ultimately this project helped us materialize and see more clearly the intersections of data in the everyday aspects of our lives, the varying qualities and kinds of data, and the labor of generating data interpretations.