Liliana Bounegru

Narrating Networks : Exploring the affordances of networks as storytelling devices in journalism

Networks have become the de facto diagram of the Big Data age (try searching Google Images for [big data AND visualisation] and see). The concept of networks has become central to many fields of human inquiry and is said to revolutionise everything from medicine to markets to military intelligence. While the mathematical and analytical capabilities of networks have been extensively studied over the years, in this article we argue that the storytelling affordances of networks have been comparatively neglected. In order to address this we use multimodal analysis to examine the stories that networks evoke in a series of journalism articles. We develop a protocol by means of which narrative meanings can be construed from network imagery and the context in which it is embedded, and discuss five different kinds of narrative readings of networks, illustrated with analyses of examples from journalism. Finally, to support further research in this area, we discuss methodological issues that we encountered and suggest directions for future study to advance and broaden research around this defining aspect of visual culture after the digital turn.

Ways of Seeing Data: Towards a Critical Literacy for Data Visualizations as Research Objects and Research Devices

Gray, Bounegru, Milan and Ciuccarelli contribute towards a critical literacy for data visualizations as research objects and devices. The chapter argues for methodological reflexivity around the use of data visualizations in research as both instruments and objects of study. The authors develop a heuristic framework for studying three forms of mediation which data visualizations enact – drawing on research and insights from new media studies, science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, cultural studies and critical theory. The chapter illustrates these three forms of mediation with an analysis of visualizations of public finances from civil society organizations, media outlets and public institutions. The authors conclude with an argument towards a broader program of critical literacy for reading and doing research with data visualizations.

A reality check(list) for digital methods

Digital Methods can be defined as the repurposing of the inscriptions generated by digital media for the study of collective phenomena. The strength of these methods comes from their capacity to take advantage of the data and computational capacities of online platforms; their weakness comes from the difficulty to separate the phenomena that they investigate from the features of the media in which they manifest (‘the medium is the message’, according to McLuhan’s 1964 dictum). In this article, we discuss various methodological difficulties deriving from the lack of separation between medium and message and propose eight practical precautions to deal with it.

Data infrastructure literacy

A recent report from the UN makes the case for “global data literacy” in order to realise the opportunities afforded by the “data revolution”. Here and in many other contexts, data literacy is characterised in terms of a combination of numerical, statistical and technical capacities. In this article, we argue for an expansion of the concept to include not just competencies in reading and working with datasets but also the ability to account for, intervene around and participate in the wider socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored and analysed – which we call “data infrastructure literacy”. We illustrate this notion with examples of “inventive data practice” from previous and ongoing research on open data, online platforms, data journalism and data activism. Drawing on these perspectives, we argue that data literacy initiatives might cultivate sensibilities not only for data science but also for data sociology, data politics as well as wider public engagement with digital data infrastructures. The proposed notion of data infrastructure literacy is intended to make space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention around data in educational programmes and beyond, including how data infrastructures can be challenged, contested, reshaped and repurposed to align with interests and publics other than those originally intended.

How to Tell Stories with Networks: Exploring the Narrative Affordances of Graphs with the Iliad

The chapter starts with a short summary of what we consider to be five central challenges concerning the recent move towards Digital Methods. We then interrogate David Berry’s concept of ‘digital Bildung’ as a means of facing these challenges. Our goal in this discussion is, maybe paradoxically, to move the spotlight from ‘the digital’ and programming, to the plethora of concepts and knowledges mobilized in digital tools. To this end, we discuss three examples that allow us to both concretise and complicate the debate about what kind of skill set is needed by digital scholars.