5(1) 2019: Inequalities and Divides in Digital Cultures

Browsing 5(1) 2019: Inequalities and Divides in Digital Cultures by Subject "Datenanalyse"

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  • Article
    Accounting for Visual Bias in Tangible Data Design
    Resch, Gabby (2019) , S. 43-59
    Data engagement has become an important facet of engaged citizenship. While this is celebrated by those who advocate for expanding participatory channels in civic experience, others have rightfully expressed concern about the complicated dimensions of balancing access with data literacy. If engaged citizenship increasingly requires the ability to interpret civic data through city dashboards and open data portals, then there is a concomitant requirement for diverse populations to develop critical perspectives on data representation (what is commonly referred to as data visualisation, information graphics, etc.). Effective data representations are used to ground conversations, communicate policy ideas and substantiate arguments about important civic issues, but they are also frequently used to deceive and mislead. Expanding statistical, graphical, digital and media literacy is a necessary component of fostering a critical data culture, but who are the beneficiaries of expanded models of literacy and modes of civic engagement? Which communities are invalidated in the design of civic data interfaces? In this article, I summarise the results of a design study undertaken to inform the development of accessible data representation techniques. In this study, I conducted fourteen 2-h participatory design-inspired interview sessions with blind and visually impaired citizens. These sessions, in which I iteratively developed new physical data objects and assessed their interpretability, leveraged a public transit dataset made available by the City of Toronto through its open data portal. While ostensibly “open,” this dataset was initially published in a format that was exclusively visual, excluding blind and visually impaired citizens from engaging with it. What I discovered through the study was that the process of translating 2D, screen-based civic dashboards and data visualisations into tangible objects has the capacity to reintroduce visual biases in ways that data designers may not generally be aware of.
  • Article
    Mapping Wikipedia’s Geolinguistic Contours
    Dittus, Martin; Graham, Mark (2019) , S. 147-164
    Wikipedia is one of the predominant ways in which internet users obtain knowledge about the world. It is also one of the most important mirrors, or augmentations, of the world: it contains representations of all manner of places. However, Wikipedia’s knowledge of the world is characterised by a linguistic inequality. Although it is written in a growing number of languages, some languages are overrepresented and contribute significantly more to Wikipedia’s body of knowledge than others. This deeply affects how the world is represented on Wikipedia, and by whom: it has been shown that for many countries in the Global South, there are more articles written in English than in their respective native languages. As a result, a significant number of people are being excluded from the collective process of knowledge production, solely on the basis of their native language. Who writes these representations of local places, and for which audiences? We present early findings from the first study of Wikipedia’s geolinguistic contours. We investigate to what extent local languages are involved in the process of creating local representations. In a large-scale quantitative analysis across the almost 300 language versions of Wikipedia, we identify regions of the world where local languages such as Armenian, Catalan or Malay are dominant sources of representation for local places, and we contrast these findings with instances where representations are significantly shaped by foreign languages. Where do, and do not, we see significant amounts of local content available in local languages? Where are the most detailed local representations largely written in foreign languages, intended for foreign audiences? And what factors can explain this?