A bit about me!

I am currently working in adult education, supporting those who have literacy and numeracy difficulties. The projects I am involved in over the next 12 months are focussed on developing pathways for access to digital supports, mapping user journey models to ensure user success on our LMS, as well as concluding the development of a self-assessment web application. I made the leap into the education sector just before Covid-19, after over 7 years in the disability sector, so I have been on a fairly steep learning curve over the last 12 months.

IDEL has helped me fast track my learning; providing much-needed context, as well as new ideas and thoughts that are helping to shape my thinking and work. I’m looking forward to this next step and delving deeper into how data and data-driven technologies can shape learning, its impact on students, and how this might inform my work going forward. I’m particularly interested in the ethical considerations and debate regarding data and how it impacts society, and how our data can encode pre-existing bias and amplify systematic exclusion.

Who I am outside of this? Well, I imagine some of that will be reflected in our data visualisations over the coming weeks but for now, I hope the above pie chart can give you an idea of my current ‘5km’ restricted existence! Creating a hand-drawn visualisation each week is a slightly daunting prospect, however, I am looking forward to the process and how it evolves. Looking outside of the ‘Dear Data’ project for some more inspiration for the next few weeks, I came across the below projects. Utilising the power of visual narratives is new and exciting territory, which is hopefully something I can develop and replicate over the coming weeks. 

• The Stories Behind a Line – A project by Federica Fragapane with Alex Piacentini, which is a visual narrative of six asylum seekers’ routes.
• Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers – Becky Cooper, the project’s creator, passed out blank maps (with return postage) of Manhattan to strangers she met walking around the city and asked them to “map their Manhattan.”
• Data Stories podcast episode ‘xkcd or the art of data storytelling with web cartoons’ – Randall Munroe the creator of the xkcd webcomics, talks about his data visualisations, his creative process, the power of a visual narrative, and the relation of complexity and simplicity in his work. I really liked Randall’s movie narrative chart and how he depicted the relationships between the characters, plus you can’t go wrong with Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park!