»Poppyfield«
Image Credit: Valentina D’Efilippo and Nicolas Pigelet
»Life Below Water: Marine species under threat«
Image Credit: World Bank
The online whiteboard was prepared in such a way that each group would go through the instructions in a self-guided manner. To start, they casually engaged with the visualization that their group was assigned to. They were instructed right at the beginning to try to exhaustively cover the views and interactions that the visualizations support. In addition to their interaction with the visualization itself, they were invited to also consult write-ups (if available) to gain more insight into the process and design decisions behind the visualization or regarding the underlying data.
The self-guided workshop follows a five-step process. During step one, the participants individually explore the visualization assigned to them with the goal to familiarize themselves with the visualization, understand what it is about, i.e. they should understand the objective of the visualization and what message is being conveyed. After their familiarization, they were asked to check in with their group to briefly share their initial impressions and discuss open questions or things that should be clarified before proceeding. In step two, the groups specified the application contexts and (intended) stakeholders of the visualization (e.g. someone who would benefit from the visualization). They were also asked to think about stakeholders in a broader sense, for example in terms of who commissioned or created the visualization and why (e.g. for political reasons, entertainment, or educational purposes) as well as what they perceived as the intended users/viewers and actual audience of the visualization. In step three, the groups addressed the type of data and its origin. Leading questions for this step pertained, amongst others, to the creators of the dataset (e.g. which team, research group, person) and on behalf of what entity (e.g. company, government, organisation, institution) as well as to what mechanisms or procedures were used to collect or create the data (e.g. hardware apparatus or sensor, manual human curation/selection from existing sources, quantitative/qualitative research etc.). The questions for this step were inspired by Gebru et al.'s »Datasheets for Datasets« [2].