DSDD: The design of the data science diaspora dashboard

This chapter considers the relationship between data and the city by critically examining six key issues with respect city dashboards: epistemology, scope and access, veracity and validity, usability and literacy, use and utility, and ethics. While city dashboards provide useful tools for evaluating and managing urban services, understanding and formulating policy, and creating public knowledge and counter-narratives, our analysis reveals a number of conceptual and practical shortcomings. In order for city dashboards to reach their full potential we advocate a number of related shifts in thinking and praxes and forward an agenda for addressing the issues we highlight. Our analysis is informed by our endeavours in building the Dublin Dashboard.

ISPRS Annals Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, III-4/W1

As many cities increase in size across multiple dimensions such as population, economic output and physical size, new methods for understanding and managing cities are required. Data produced by and about urban environments offer insight into what is happening in cities. Real-time data from sensors within the city record current transport and environmental conditions such as noise levels, water levels, journey times and public transport delays. Similarly administrative data such as demographics, employment statistics, property prices and crime rates all provide insight into how a city is evolving. Traditionally, these data were maintained separately and managed by individual city departments. Advances in technology and a move to open-government have placed many of these data in the public domain. Urban dashboards have emerged as a technique to visualise these data in an accessible way. This paper describes the implementation of one such dashboard, the Dublin Dashboard, an interactive website which collects, analyses and visualises data from a variety of sources about Dublin in Ireland through a series of interactive maps, graphs and applications. This paper describes the approach, the data and the technology used to develop the Dublin Dashboard and acts as a guideline for developing urban dashboards in other cities.

Journal of Location Based Services, 2020

Nowadays large amounts of movement data is available. This makes it important not only to be aware of how to collect and store this data, but also how to visually represent the information to get insights and "read" the story behind data. When visualising origin-destination data, the traditional flow map is the solution most often selected. A single flow map, however, does not necessarily show all the available attribute variables and also tends too clutter quickly.A more appropriate solution is a dashboard. It provides users with summaries of the represented information. Despite the dashboard suitability to support getting insights, current dashboards have some limitations regarding the flexibility of the layout. To overcome these limitations, we introduce adaptability in dashboards. In our case adaptability ensures that users get insights into the component of interest (space, time, or attribute) on 3 levels of detail. Adaptability is initiated by user tasks to resulting in changes in the visualizations of represented information and dashboard interfaces. We illustrate the concept of an adaptable dashboard with two case studies.

2015

This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard --a website that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information --from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence, to unpack the building of the Dashboard and the emergent politics of data and design. Our findings reveal four main observations. First, a dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing technologies and systems, and power geometries to assemble, produce and maintain the website. Second, the production and maintenance of a dashboard unfolds contextually, contingently and relationally through transduction. Third, the praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects: just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape. Fourth, the data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city. We conclude that rather than frame dashboard development in purely technical terms, it is important to openly recognize their contested and negotiated politics and praxis. of data, modes of display and analysis, and deployment . The data dashboards process and present are the product of the ideas, instruments, practices, contexts, knowledges and systems used to generate, process and analyze them. Urban data are framed by and situated within data assemblages that profoundly shapes their production, distribution, and use (Kitchin 2014b; see ). As a data assemblage a dashboard is a complex sociotechnical system, composed of many apparatuses and elements that are thoroughly entwined 5 and shape each other through a contingent and complex web of multifaceted relations and condition how a dashboard is formulated, developed, administered, deployed, and used. Table 1: The apparatus and elements of a data assemblage Apparatus Elements Systems of thought Modes of thinking,

The advent of massively interconnected technologies over cities raises equally big challenges regarding interfaces to enable citizens to make sense of urban data for improving their daily life and for fostering online participation. The existing dashboards include only pre-defined and limited use cases which can only address the most common needs of citizens, but do not allow for personalization. As consequence, the great effort of cities to make data widely available has still scarce capacity to get an impact for the public good. In this work, we propose an open source dashboard with a set of tools and services to enable citizens to easily explore city-related data and create interactive visualizations. Moreover, users can personalize the dashboard based on their individual, local, task-specific goals and interests, and share the resulting dashboard to promote co-creation. In this way, citizens can build up a data-driven public awareness, supporting an open, transparent, and collaborative city where they are actively involved in local activities and campaigns.

2019

The rapid growth of information and communication technology has led to dramatic changes in people's daily lives. This revolution has resulted in a new form of government, known as e-government. The effective use of e-government in municipalities is referred to as municipal egovernment. The main purpose of this research is to extract the visual features which have been used in municipality portal graphic design. This study is mixed methods research; the results of the research have been reached through simultaneous analysis of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The population of this study is all images of the urban portals of all capitals in developed countries. Sample includes portals of the capital cities in the four English-speaking countries, which are also among the top 10 in the 2015 ranking of e-government ranking. A total of 50 samples were selected from four cities. The samples have been examined using a researcher-made checklist whose validity and reliability have been provided by pre-test and re-test. The visual elements in the samples are evaluated with the checklist. Analysis of the research data has been carried out as quasi-quantitative. According to the results, there are many similarities in the design of graphical user interface. However, there are differences.

2021

City dashboards present information about a city to a broad audience with some thought given as to how some of these audiences might understand the information. However, little research has looked at how ’citizens’ make sense of dashboards. Using two sample dashboards, we asked community activists from four different areas (Health, Environment, Transport and Agriculture) to explore the information displayed. Using grounded theory approaches, we looked at factors which support or hinder users sense-making. From further analysis of the data we identify four key challenges that need to be addressed to support users making sense of city dashboards: lack of support given for understanding the information and data presented, lack of possibilities for users to engage, lack of purpose, and a lack of governance. We recommend a series of design and development actions for city dashboards creators for each challenge area. The desire to give access to open data through dashboards requires a con...

ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences

The new data sources give the possibility to answer analytically the questions that arise from mobility manager. The process of transforming raw data into knowledge is very complex, and it is necessary to provide metaphors of visualizations that are understandable to decision makers. Here, we propose an analytical platform that extracts information on the mobility of individuals from mobile phone by applying Data Mining methodologies. The main results highlighted here are both technical and methodological. First, communicating information through visual analytics techniques facilitates understanding of information to those who have no specific technical or domain knowledge. Secondly, the API system guarantees the ability to export aggregates according to the granularity required, enabling other actors to produce new services based on the extracted models. For the future, we expect to extend the platform by inserting other layers. For example, a layer for measuring the sustainability index of a territory, such as the ability of public transport to attract private mobility or the index that measures how many private vehicle trips can be converted into electrical mobility.

Big Data & Society

We develop the concept of ‘aesthetic practices’ to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education’s Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required so that data produced at dispersed sites can be brought into relation and projected as populations in forms such as bar charts, heat maps and tables. Two examples of aesthetic practices are analysed based on ethnographic studies we have conducted on the production of data for the Hub and Warehouse: metadata and data cleaning. Metadata enables data to come into relation by containing and accounting for (some of) the differences between data. Data cleaning deals with the indeterminacies and absences of data and involves algorithms to determine ...