Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
DataArt
This digital art project takes the form of a website containing over a dozen interactive visualisations of the BBC's and The Guardian's news stories and other data (text, image, video). The visualisations produce patterns from information, showing a temporal and pictorial overview of topics and the potential to interact with the data. Selected projects have been released as open-source software, expanding ways for audiences to engage with the work. AHRC funding enabled an official collaboration with the BBC, who saw the project as a prototype platform for how their news data resources could be made available to the general public. Funding for this project came via an AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship £177,752 (2009-13).
Please see research portfolio for full documentation of research dimensions.
Within the digital arts the visualisation of public data is a well-established field of enquiry. Open data initiatives framed as a public art practice have been explored by cultural platforms (Furtherfield), and individual practitioners such as Carter have employed demographic data to visualise social media platforms. These approaches are united by a critical approach to the content of the data but have tended to operate at arm's length from the institutions from which the material is derived. DataArt builds out from this work but attempts to more actively engage with the organisations producing the data, in this instance the BBC. Specifically, the project asked how digital arts practices working from a tradition of technological critique could work within an institution to visualise its data resources in ways that enabled innovative public forms of access to it. As much of the data made available to the project took the form of current affairs and broadcast material, supplementary questions settled on how visualisation practices could enable critiques of media reporting practices. Corby was Project Director, as AHRC-BBC Research Fellow, responsible for project origination, development and management of a production team of five, (including seconded BBC staff). Extended studio practice involved programming, visualisation design, developing open source software and website production. Over its three-year period, DataArt produced a model of collaboration between arts practitioners and significant public organisations, by showing how digital arts practices can mobilise institutionally-situated data in different ways. Through the release of open software, the project expanded ways of engaging publics with data; further, by developing innovative expressions of difficult to access archives, it showed how experimental visual and behavioural languages can develop 'new content, from old'.
