Hi. I am Audrey Desjardins from the University of Washington and I'm presenting this work
on behalf of my co-author Heidi Biggs from Penn State University.
This is Data Epics: Embarking on Literary Journeys of Home Internet of Things Data.
In this paper, we use fiction as a method to complicate the commonplace narratives of data
as intangible and objective, in the particular context of Internet of Things in the home.
In popular and common imaginaries, data are often characterized as objective,
true, and clean. The challenge is that these imaginaries limit how
people might conceptualize data, often making it hard to get a handle on how
data intersect with infrastructures, privacy issues, and structures of power.
Science and technology scholars, philosophers and designers have instead argued that data
are lively, plural, and heterogeneous ; important viewpoints for understanding the
complexity of living with data. However, shifting from common understandings of
data to these new conceptualizations is not particularly straightforward.
With the Data Epics, we offer a novel strategy for examining the ways in which home IoT data
are enmeshed in our lives, and how they are lively, local, personal and interpretive.
The Data Epics are a series of four chapters written by Emily,
a fiction writer enthusiast, based on monthly home IoT data.
The data are collected by Susan, a self-declared IoT enthusiast who lives with over 40 IoT devices,
including smart plugs, motion sensors, door sensors, and voice assistants.
The process for creating a Data Epics is as follows.
First, smart devices in Susan's home collect data for 1 month.
After one month, we retrieve the data.
We clean it (removing unnecessary meta data, formatting certain information like timestamps).
We then create a simple visualization of the data that we send to Emily, the fiction writer.
She writes a short fiction story.
We typeset and create a layout for the book.
We print and hand bind it.
And finally send the book to Susan for her to read.
We created a total of 4 chapters over about 10 months.
To give a sense of the stories, I will read a short excerpt from chapter 2, called Illumination.
She is born in darkness. The absence of light does not bother
her, nor does it confuse her. Coming alive with the imperative of most living things, to move,
she does. At speeds almost incomprehensible she rushes off as quickly as she can,
determined not to be a laggard. Only knowing that she has a destination she must get to.
She does not yet know what that destination is, only that she must get to it,
and quickly. Making copies of herself, she reaches in every direction, searching.
Our analysis of this work took two forms. First we conducted a literary textual analysis of
the 4 chapters, looking at how the new data imaginaries offered
a tangible way of representing data as lively, heterogeneous, or part of assemblages.
We particularly focus on how the stories offer new backdrops (or new worlds)
to ground data by offering them a place to go, bringing our imaginations along with.
We also detail how The Data Epics present data taking a life of their own, a life where they
come into existence, travel around, are duplicated, exchanged, and might be deleted.
We also look at how data Meshes with other things and beings, and how, in doing so,
power dynamics and hierarchies emerge alongside anxieties and concerns of control.
In addition to our textual analysis, we also analyzed
Emily's process for writing, our own process of preparing data and the books,
as well as Susan's reactions through qualitative coding of our interviews for each chapter.
By looking at the labor intensive processes part of this project
(data collection, cleaning, typesetting, book binding, etc), we saw how layers of
interpretation reveal that data are not clean and perfect, but manipulated and transformed.
The messy and imperfect nature of the data were also strong starting points for
interpretation when Emily was constructing the stories, often looking for anomalies.
While the stories didn't match her expectations at first (that data was perfect,
clear and easy to translate into stories), With time, Susan learned that the epics
are not a perfect mirror of her existence at home, but that some slivers of her life would
reappear, transformed yet recognizable, throughout the stories.
The Data Epics were successful at getting Susan (as well as Emily, and us, the researchers) closer
to home IoT data in ways that STS theorists and other HCI researchers have argued are important:
In seeing data as situated, lively and materially enmeshed in our lives and homes.
Getting closer, we argue, is perhaps an important step
in building intimacy, knowledge, trust and critical perspective with data,
something crucial and necessary before finding ways to gain agency and control of one's data.
Thank you for listening. And many thanks to Susan
and Emily for being willing to work on this project with us.