Charles
Perin,
Department
of
Computer
Science
City,
University
of
London
We live in an increasingly data-driven world, where commercial, societal, environmental, and political decisions are made based on data. However, we also live in a world where most people lack the literacy required to participate in the data-informed debates of modern society. Perhaps the main barrier to improving people’s data literacy is that data is often associated with complexity, large scale, corporatism, and dystopia.
But data is about people.
In this talk, I argue that visualization can transform the relationship people have with data by revealing how data is ubiquitous, personal, cherishable, reflective, and a medium for sharing stories about self and others. When it comes to personal data, notions like subjectivity, self-reflection, sharing, and privacy supersede the typical visualization golden rules of truth, faithfulness, accuracy, and efficiency.
I will demonstrate the need for expressive visualization authoring tools by contrasting hand-crafted visualizations of artists and designers with personal visualizations people create using generic tools. I will also discuss new opportunities for research that focus on helping people create relatable data artifacts and mementos that support personal recall and sharing of experiences.
Bio: Charles Perin is a Lecturer (eq. Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at City, University of London, and part of the giCentre research group. Dr. Perin’s research focuses on using visualization to transform the relationship people have with data in their everyday lives. He explores the design of authoring tools for people to examine, make sense of, and share personal data. He also conducts research on designing engaging interactions for visualizations, on sports visualization and on ubiquitous visualization. Before joining City, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the iLab, at the University of Calgary. He is a PhD graduate of the Université Paris Sud-XI and Inria.