In our first session of 2023, we welcome Hen Wilkinson, Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. She will lead an interactive session presenting how data viz was used to analyse shifts in energy during group discussion, and what we can learn to help with our own data visualisation.
Tuesday 7th February, 3-4pm Room G.11, Fry Building, Woodland Road, University of Bristol (view map) Hybrid talk – Hen will be joining us remotely but we encourage you to join us in-person if you can
This talk presents an early-stage methodology for which emerged from empirical PhD research at the University of Bristol. The visualisations resulted from a transdisciplinary team of social scientist, data scientist and graphic design and formed part of the analysis process rather than simply presenting results. This talk presents the outputs and discusses the research into design/aesthetics that lies behind the final visualisation.
Since training as an accredited mediator in the 1990s, Hen has been working on how to creatively engage with conflict, difference and divide within teams, organisations and local communities. In 2001, this led to the formation of Community Resolve, and 15 years later she was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council to review and reflect on that work. Her funded PhD was followed by ESRC postdoc funding as a senior research associate at the JGI. Hen currently holds a Researcher-in-Residence post with REPHRAIN (a national hub for addressing online harms) and works on the emerging field of peacetech as a Research Fellow at the JGI.
In our next session Allee Tanner from the Jean Golding Institute will introduce us to Streamlit, a Python library that can quickly turn your scripts into web frontends and dashboards.
Tuesday 6th December, 3-4pm Room G.11, Fry Building, Woodland Road, University of Bristol (view map) In-person talk (remote option available)
Streamlit is a Python library for rapid prototyping, templating and deploying data-science dashboards and web-apps (a desktop-app option is also in development). A core goal is simplicity, allowing even beginners to create data-apps within minutes, harnessing powerful graphical packages while avoiding the complexity these often entail. Python remains at the forefront of research coding languages, being relatively easy to learn, having a wide selection of professionally-developed 3rd-party libraries, all supported by a dynamic, responsive community.
Good research relies on clear communication. The power of Streamlit is in providing an accessible way for us to share the messages emerging from underlying, complex work. While graphics libraries to visualise analyses exist, most notably in JavaScript, often these require considerable coding expertise, or may be inflexible in their application. With intelligent API design – as Streamlit characterises – these complexities can be managed, renewing focus on the research message.
This session aims to give an overview of Streamlit, demonstrate the ways in which it can be used in research, and cover some basics of the Streamlit API. We hope the session will encourage researchers to explore how Streamlit might be used in their work.
Allee Tanner is a research software engineer with the Jean Golding Institute for Data Science (JGI). Allee’s research background is in earth sciences biosciences, leading to a PhD in evolutionary genomics with a scholarship in teaching. After completing his PhD, Allee dabbled in a post-doc with the medical school, before joining the RSE team in 2019. Since then, his research projects have included epidemiology, physics and environmental mineralogy, and he teaches coding and research skills as a member of the Advanced Computing Research Centre.
We’re thrilled to announce a new series of DataViz talks for the start of the 2022/23 academic year! As ever, our events our open to everyone and you do not need to be a member of the University of Bristol.
We start with an in-person talk (remote option available) from Duncan Bradley @duncanbradley_ on the Cognitive Processing of Magnitude In Data Visualisations.
Tuesday 1st November, 3-4pm Royal Fort House, University of Bristol In-person talk (remote option available)
Data visualisations allow viewers to efficiently appraise many facets of a dataset. Systematically manipulating data visualisation designs helps us understand the processes involved in interpreting presented information. In this seminar, I will discuss a series of experiments revealing how axis limits inform judgements of how large or small plotted values are. These findings contribute to our understanding of the cognitive processing of magnitude in data visualisations, with potential consequences for design recommendations. This work provides insight into how specific design choices might help communicate messages effectively, or might mislead viewers.
Duncan Bradley is a final-year PhD student in the Division of Neuroscience at the University of Manchester. He is interested in how data visualisations can leverage the human cognitive system to effectively convey messages. His research explores the cognitive processes involved in extracting meaning from data visualisations and the influence of design choices on the interpretation of presented information.
We’re excited to announce a Digital Arts and Humanities special edition of the DataViz Interest Group being held in-person as part of Bristol Data Week, 12:00–1:30pm at St George’s Bristol. We have four talks illustrating the spectrum of activities in this fast-developing area of research.
Digital Security by Design and the Secret Life of Data
Genevieve Liveley Professor of Classics, University of Bristol
When we think about the security of data on our phones and computers, we might think about passwords and permissions, or about data encryption – but we rarely think about what our data looks like, or what is does as it moves around hidden inside our phones, computers, digital devices, our apps and networks. This invisibility – this secret life of data – makes it difficult to communicate the benefits of innovations such as Digital Security by Design (DSbD) and to imagine futures where this paradigm shift in technology can be most beneficial. This presentation explores the value of creative storytelling as one way to explore the sociotechnical impacts of DSbD.
Genevieve is Professor of Classics, RISCS Fellow, and Turing Fellow at the University of Bristol. As a narratologist, she has particular research interests in stories and their impact on futures thinking – especially in the context of emerging technologies and cyber security. She leads the Futures strand for the UKRI’s Digital Security by Design (DSbD) Discribe Hub+ programme, and as RISCS Fellow, heads the ‘Anticipation and Futures Literacy’ research theme.
Mapping Intercultural Conversations
Jo Crow Associate Professor in Latin American Studies, University of Bristol
The Mapping Intercultural Conversations project started in 2014, with a series of workshops involving many different people in Chile and the UK who wanted to share knowledge and ideas about Mapuche history, interculturalism, representation and self-representation, memory and digital culture. It centres around three prominent Mapuche leaders in early 20th century Chile, whose contested legacies live on to this day: Manuel Manquilef, Manuel Aburto Panguilef, and Venancio Coñuepán. We asked ourselves the questions: Why and how did these figures become the important political spokesmen that they did? Part of the answer lies in the vast web of connections that they built up over the years. The project webpage invites you to look into their complex social networks, and in turn serves as an entry point to a history of Mapuche political activism in Chile which challenges overly-simple identity categories.
Jo’s research interests include Chilean cultural history, nationalism and nation building, and Mapuche history, intellectuality and politics. Her new research project investigates the production of knowledge and circulation of ideas about race and indigenous cultures in twentieth century Latin America, focusing specifically on Chilean-Peruvian intellectual networks.
Corpus Creation in Digital Humanities: A Work in Progress
John David Vandevert Postgraduate in Musicology, University of Bristol
When dealing with historiographical information and its contemporary development in Humanities research, it is well-known that a researcher must examine how “historical importance” and “historical truth” are being comprehended. But in Digital Humanities work, the requirement is greater, as leading any project is a subjectively-created corpus of aggregated data. Ergo, in the inescapably flawed process of “datafication,” how do researchers grapple with questions of ‘vantage point’ and epistemic authenticity? In this talk, I will introduce some early challenges regarding corpus creation in my digital project on contextualizing Russian Hip-Hop’s aesthetics and the need for a reexamination of how a corpus is created.
John is a postgraduate in the faculty of Musicology, currently studying Russian Hip-Hop, specifically Dmitry Kuzenstov’s 2020 album “Hoshkhonog”, to guage how the genre’s aesthetics embodies or negates the presence of the historically-defined quality of “musical Russianess.” His main interest lies in understanding how beliefs on national identity and cultural belonging, along with accumulated life experiences and personal ideologies present themselves in a composer’s musical vocabulary. He plans on pursuing Doctoral studies on the subject in the fall of this year.
Mapping American Socio-Commercial Networks
Thomas Larkin Augustine Heard Fellow, University of Bristol
Mapping American Socio-Commercial Networks is a pilot digital humanities project intended to demonstrate the extent of networking and mobility between China and the West in the nineteenth century. Intended to draw together researchers from Bristol, Aix-Marseille, and Vancouver, the project catalogues foreigners, their networks, and their movements in nineteenth-century China using GIS and Social Network Analysis. The ultimate goal is to produce a user-friendly digital platform for visualising socio-commercial networks and transnational mobility. Aimed at researchers and students, the platform will both serve as a reference tool and address the need for alternative pedagogical approaches to teaching global history.
Thomas is an historian of China and the United States with particular interests in global-microhistorical and transimperial methodologies. His research engages broadly with themes related to culture, gender, race, and identity construction in colonial and (semi)colonial spaces.
Our friends at RIOT Science Club are hosting an interesting looking talk from Dr Tracey Weissgerber, a meta-researcher at the BIH QUEST Center for Responsible Research (Berlin Institute of Health at Charité).
