Visualising Information for Advocacy is a book about how advocates and activists use visual elements in their campaigns. This 170-page guide features over 60 case studies from around the world to provide an introduction to understanding visual information and a framework for using images for influence.
There are so many interesting aspects to this example but the one that really struck me was that rather than shutting it down the problems surfaced through Schooloscope could have been used to ignite sustained dialogue with communities and authorities about bias and discrimination in the UKs school system. For example, looking at the methodological concerns with Ofsted, these concerns are certainly not new but being able to clearly see the impact of a methodology that fails to capture the true experience for the child could have been used as evidence for systems changes. Could a second graphic have been added that represented how parents/teacher/children felt about the rating? Another example is how Schooloscope inadvertently highlighted the potential psycho-social harm related to surfacing socio-economic realities for parents who are just trying to do right by their kids. While Schooloscope was originally intending to simply give parents some information about schools in their area, what it actually did was visually represent deeper community level issues related to power and advantage. It would be interesting to think about how, when this kind of thing happens, that data can be fed to activists challenging institutionally supported/driven discrimination. Do projects like this that get this kind of rich 'secondary' data have a responsibility to carry on those surprise conversations or to pass it to others that will?
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There are so many interesting
There are so many interesting aspects to this example but the one that really struck me was that rather than shutting it down the problems surfaced through Schooloscope could have been used to ignite sustained dialogue with communities and authorities about bias and discrimination in the UKs school system. For example, looking at the methodological concerns with Ofsted, these concerns are certainly not new but being able to clearly see the impact of a methodology that fails to capture the true experience for the child could have been used as evidence for systems changes. Could a second graphic have been added that represented how parents/teacher/children felt about the rating? Another example is how Schooloscope inadvertently highlighted the potential psycho-social harm related to surfacing socio-economic realities for parents who are just trying to do right by their kids. While Schooloscope was originally intending to simply give parents some information about schools in their area, what it actually did was visually represent deeper community level issues related to power and advantage. It would be interesting to think about how, when this kind of thing happens, that data can be fed to activists challenging institutionally supported/driven discrimination. Do projects like this that get this kind of rich 'secondary' data have a responsibility to carry on those surprise conversations or to pass it to others that will?
Previous Posts:
If everything is a network, nothing is a network
Data in development, human rights and HIV/AIDS
Materialising 'online objects'
Visualising #Prejudice: Tracking casual homophobia in real time
Dancing to the drums of the Islamic State - Arabs mock IS
"Leave your potatoes at home" : working with marginalised communities on using data and tech in advocacy
Data Traffic
Should Schools Be Closed? Learning from Schooloscope, an OpenData post-mortem
A small list about big data
Some Marginal Notes About The Dark Sides Of Data
"Data is part-truth part-lie"
Data-gazing
Through the macroscope: advocacy and data about violence
Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis
Notes on Data & Design