Living Digital Data research program

People’s encounters and entanglements with the personal digital data that they generate is a new and compelling area of research interest in this age of the ascendancy of digital data. Members of the public are now called upon to engage with a variety of forms of information about themselves and to confront the complexities of how these details are used by others. Personal digital data assemblages are configured as human bodies, digital devices, code, data, time and space come together.

 

Personal digital data assemblages

 

Over the past few years I have been researching the social aspects of personal digital data: how people understand and conceptualise these data, how they use their data, what people know about where their personal data go and how their data are used by second and third parties.I have analysed the metaphors that are used to describe digital data, the politics of digital data, the types of data that are collected by apps and self-tracking devices, how people use these software and devices and how personal digital data are materialised, or rendered into visualisations or three-dimensional objects. I have sought to theorise the ontology of personal digital data, drawing particularly sociomaterialism, feminist technoscience, cultural geography and sensory studies. (See My Recent Publications for further details.)

I am bringing these research questions together under a program that I have named ‘Living Digital Data’. This title builds on my conceptualisation of digital data as ‘lively’ in a number of ways.

 

 

Lively Data

 

 

The first element of the vitality of digital data relates to the ways in which they are generated and what happens thereafter. The personal digital information that is constantly generated contributes to data assemblages that are heterogeneous and dynamic, their character changing as more data points are added and others removed. Digital data may be described as having their own social lives as they circulate in the digital data economy and are purposed and repurposed. Second, digital data constitute forms of knowledge about human (and nonhuman) life itself and hence possess another type of vitality. Third, personal digital data have impacts on people’s lives, shaping the decisions and actions that people make and those that other people make about them.  The profiles constructed from these data can influence decisions about the opportunities people have to travel, access employment, credit or insurance, the people that they meet on online dating sites, the knowledges that they hold about themselves and their bodies and those of intimate others. Finally, personal digital data are forms of livelihoods, contributing to the commodification and capitalisation of information. Indeed, they may be described as a form of biocapital, which possesses many forms of value beyond the personal: for research, commercial, security, managerial and governmental agencies.

This approach recognises the entanglements of personal digital data assemblages with human action. Not only are personal digital data assemblages partly comprised of information about human action, but their materialisations are also the products of human action, and these materialisations can influence future human action.

Rather than refer to data literacy or data management skills, I take up the term ‘data sense’ to encapsulate a broader meaning of ‘data sense’ that includes human senses (sight, sound, touch, smell and taste) and how these are part of people’s responses to data and also acknowledges the role played by digital sensors in the act of ‘sense-making’; or coming to terms with digital data.

 

Data Sense

 

Interesting HCI research on self-tracking: a reading list

In a recent blog post, I published a reading list of critical social research into self-tracking. And in another recent post, I discussed what I saw as the intersections of digital sociology and human-computer interaction (HCI) research. I argued that researchers in each approach should pay attention to what the others are doing, as there are many shared interests.

In this post, I present a reading list of what I (as sociologist) have chosen to designate as ‘interesting’ HCI research on the same phenomenon. This is based on what I consider ‘interesting’ – studies that go beyond design or technical features of self-tracking technologies to address how people use them and incorporate the data into their everyday lives.

There is a wealth of HCI research on self-tracking. HCI researchers have published earlier and more often on self-tracking compared to sociologists and other social researchers. This is largely due to their publishing conventions, in which peer-reviewed conference papers have the status of journal articles, and allow people to publish their research much more quickly. Probably because they are located within the world of digital technology design, HCI researchers devoted their attention much earlier than social scientists to what was initially (and sometimes still) called ‘lifelogging’ and how digital devices were used by practitioners.

Some of the research below takes an explicitly critical or reflective approach to self-tracking – although I have found that this is quite rare in HCI, where the ‘persuasive computing’ approach dominates in research on this topic. A few articles report on speculative design approaches or ways of materialising data that are innovative. Others simply offer some interesting material on how and why people are engaging in self-tracking.

Barrass S. (2016) Diagnosing blood pressure with Acoustic Sonification singing bowls. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 85: 68-71.

Choe EK, Lee NB, Lee B, Pratt W and Kientz JA. (2014) Understanding quantified-selfers’ practices in collecting and exploring personal data. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14). Toronto: ACM Press, 1143-1152.

Choe EK, Lee NB and Schraefel M. (2015) Revealing visualization insights from Quantified-Selfers’ personal data presentations. Computer Graphics and Applications 35: 28-37.

Cuttone A, Petersen MK and Larsen JE. (2014) Four data visualization heuristics to facilitate reflection in personal informatics. Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design for All and Accessibility Practice. Heraklion: Springer, 541-552.

Doherty AR, Caprani N, Conaire CÓ, Kalnikaite V, Gurrin C, Smeaton AF and O’Connor NE. (2011) Passively recognising human activities through lifelogging. Computers in Human Behavior 27: 1948-1958.

Doherty AR, Pauly-Takacs K, Caprani N, Gurrin C, Moulin CJA, O’Connor NE and Smeaton AF. (2012) Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory using the SenseCam. Human–Computer Interaction 27: 151-174.

Elsden C, Kirk D, Selby M and Speed C. (2015) Beyond personal informatics: designing for experiences with data. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI ’15). Seoul: ACM Press, 2341-2344.

Elsden C, Kirk DS and Durrant AC. (2015) A quantified past: toward design for remembering with personal informatics. Human–Computer Interaction online first: 1-40.

Epstein D, Cordeiro F, Bales E, Fogarty J and Munson S. (2014) Taming data complexity in lifelogs: exploring visual cuts of personal informatics data. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’14). Vancouver: ACM Press, 667-676.

Epstein DA, Ping A, Fogarty J and Munson SA. (2015) A lived informatics model of personal informatics. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’15). Osaka: ACM Press, 731-742.

Fan C, Forlizzi J and Dey A. (2012) A spark of activity: exploring informative art as visualization for physical activity. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp ’12). Pittsburgh: ACM Press, 81-84.

Gaver WW, Bowers J, Boehner K, Boucher A, Cameron DWT, Hauenstein M, Jarvis N and Pennington S. (2013) Indoor weather stations: investigating a ludic approach to environmental HCI through batch prototyping. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’13). Paris: ACM Press, 3451-3460.

Grönvall E and Verdezoto N. (2013) Beyond self-monitoring: Understanding non-functional aspects of home-based healthcare technology. Proceedings of the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’13). Zurich: ACM Press, 587-596.

Hoyle R, Templeman R, Anthony D, Crandall D and Kapadia A. (2015) Sensitive lifelogs: a privacy analysis of photos from wearable cameras. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’ 15). ACM Press, 1645-1648.

Huang D, Tory M, Aseniero BA, Bartram L, Bateman S, Carpendale S, Tang A and Woodbury R. (2015) Personal visualization and personal visual analytics. Visualization and Computer Graphics 21: 420-433.

Kalnikaite V, Sellen A, Whittaker S and Kirk D. (2010) Now let me see where I was: understanding how lifelogs mediate memory. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’10). Atlanta: ACM Press, 2045-2054.

Khot R, Hjorth L and Mueller FF. (2014) Understanding physical activity through 3D printed material artifacts. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14). Toronto: ACM Press, 3835-3844.

Khot R, Lee J, Munz H, Aggarwal D and Mueller F. (2014) Tastybeats: making mocktails with heartbeats. Designing Interactive Futures. Vancouver: ACM Press, 467-470.

Khot RA, Pennings R and Mueller FF. (2015) EdiPulse: supporting physical activity with chocolate printed messages. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). Seoul: ACM Press, 1391-1396.

Khovanskaya V, Baumer EP, Cosley D, Voida S and Gay G. (2013) Everybody knows what you’re doing: a critical design approach to personal informatics. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’13). Paris: ACM Press, 3403-3412.

Lawson S, Kirman B, Linehan C, Feltwell T and Hopkins L. (2015) Problematising upstream technology through speculative design: the case of quantified cats and dogs. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI ’15). ACM Press, 2663-2672.

Lazar A, Koehler C, Tanenbaum J and Nguyen DH. (2015) Why we use and abandon smart devices. Proceedings of the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’15). Osaka: ACM Press, 635-646.

Lee M-H, Cha S and Nam T-J. (2015) Patina engraver: visualizing activity logs as patina in fashionable trackers. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI ’15). Seoul: ACM Press, 1173-1182.

Li I, Dey AK and Forlizzi J. (2011) Understanding my data, myself: supporting self-reflection with ubicomp technologies. Proceedings of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp ’11). Beijing: ACM, 405-414.

Liu W, Ploderer B and Hoang T. (2015) In bed with technology: challenges and opportunities for sleep tracking. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction (OzCHI ’15). ACM Press, 142-151.

Mathur A, Van den Broeck M, Vanderhulst G, Mashhadi A and Kawsar F. (2015) Tiny habits in the giant enterprise: understanding the dynamics of a quantified workplace. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp ’15). Osaka: ACM Press, 577-588.

Nissen B and Bowers J. (2015) Data-Things: digital fabrication situated within participatory data translation activities. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). Seoul: ACM Press, 2467-2476.

Oh J and Lee U. (2015) Exploring UX issues in Quantified Self technologies. Eighth International Conference on Mobile Computing and Ubiquitous Networking. Hakodate, Japan: IEEE, 53-59.

Ploderer B, Smith W, Howard S, Pearce J and Borland R. (2012) Things you don’t want to know about yourself: ambivalence about tracking and sharing personal information for behaviour change. Proceedings of the 24th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (OzCHI ’12). Melbourne: ACM Press, 489-492.

Purpura S, Schwanda V, Williams K, Stubler W and Sengers P. (2011) Fit4life: the design of a persuasive technology promoting healthy behavior and ideal weight. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Vancouver: ACM, 423-432.

Rooksby J, Rost M, Morrison A and Chalmers MC. (2014) Personal tracking as lived informatics. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Toronto: ACM, 1163-1172.

Snow S, Buys L, Roe P and Brereton M. (2013) Curiosity to cupboard: self reported disengagement with energy use feedback over time. Proceedings of the 25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference: Augmentation, Application, Innovation, Collaboration. Adelaide: ACM, 245-254.

Stusak S. (2015) Exploring the potential of physical visualizations. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’15). Stanford, CA: ACM Press, 437-440.

Stusak S, Tabard A, Sauka F, Khot RA and Butz A. (2014) Activity sculptures: exploring the impact of physical visualizations on running activity. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 20: 2201-2210.

Whooley M, Ploderer B and Gray K. (2014) On the integration of self-tracking data amongst Quantified Self members. Proceedings of the 28th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI ’14). Southport, UK: BCS, 151-160.

Williams K. (2013) The weight of things lost: self-knowledge and personal informatics. Personal Informatics.  <http://www.personalinformatics.org/docs/chi2013/williams.pdf&gt; accessed 12 May 2014.