Visualizing stories of sexual harassment in the academy: Community empowerment through qualitative data

Authors

Tommaso Elli, Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano – DensityDesign
Adam Bradley, Uncharted Software Inc.
Uta Hinrichs, University of Edinburgh
Christopher Collins, Ontario Tech University

Abstract

This paper presents the design report of an experimental data visualization art-work that deals with sexual harassment in academic environments. The visualiza-tion employs a qualitative dataset of stories of abuse and aims at nurturing emo-tional involvement by creating connections with the people behind the data. In the paper, we outline our theoretical background, considering previous research on anthropomorphic and artistic visualizations. Successively, we disclose our de-sign approach and discuss the visualizations’ capability to nurture reflection, stimulate conversations, and empower the community of people fighting against sexual harassment in academia and beyond.

Keywords

sexual harassment, artistic data visualization, prosocial behaviour, qualitative data

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.447

Citation

Elli, T., Bradley, A., Hinrichs, U., and Collins, C. (2022) Visualizing stories of sexual harassment in the academy: Community empowerment through qualitative data, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.447

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Conference Track

Research Paper