Collaborative exploration of rich data sets in an informal learning setting


Modern society's ability to collect and construct rich data sets has far outstripped our development of methods to make sense of these data sets. For many people, regardless of how sophisticated the data visualization tools, it can be difficult to "find a way in" to the data. Where does one start exploring? What questions can be asked of large data sets? It is a form of digital literacy that few have an opportunity to practice.

Museums play a role in American intellectual life as places for members of the public to gather, learn, and engage in discourse about new frontiers of human knowledge (Conn, 1998). As the face of human knowledge changes to embrace large, rich data sets, so should our cultural institutions. Large data sets like the census have traditionally been examined mostly by researchers – not the general public – and in individual research settings – not in public. We employ technology that allows us to create an exhibit that, although shared by visitors, is still able to respond to each visitor uniquely, allowing visitors to co-investigate a large census data set in a new way, through the lens of their individual demographic identities. Our institutional partner, the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, has a long history of using census data to effect social change – the 1895 publication of the Hull House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District in Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions used groundbreaking illustrations of census data to successfully advocate for social changes in an urban immigrant community. We hope to build on this tradition by creating a 21st century version of such maps.

The CoCensus exhibit provides an "entry point" into the census data set by allowing visitors to select ancestry categories that reflect their own identity. After visitors input their ancestry information into a kiosk, they receive an RFID tag that alerts a large display when the user enters the space, causing their ancestry data to be mapped onto the geography of the local urban community. Subsequent visitor movements (like approaching the display, moving laterally, or jumping) are tracked and reflected in the appearance and animation of their ancestry data. This embodied interaction approach allows each visitor to see how he or she is “reflected” in the Census data of a particular decade in American history, and to connect their family’s historical narrative to larger immigration trends. Because the display responds to all visitors within range, the visitor will also be able to see the “reflections” of other visitors. Even in museums that have a traditional object-based epistemology (Conn, 1998), visitors engage in a dialectic relationship when the design of the exhibit intersects with the personal experiences visitors bring (McLean, 1999). Visitors often “interrogate” exhibits by contrasting their lived experiences against the familiarity or “other”-ness they perceive in the exhibit, either silently or in conversation with companions. With our project, we recast the visitor-exhibit dialogue as a shared process, reifying interrogations as physical actions in the exhibition space to make them more visible and thus accessible to others.

Our project has recently won additional funding through an NSF INSPIRE award - check back for updates!