Data Portraits

• Aaron Zinman
• Judith Donath
• Alex Dragulescu
• Fernanda Viegas
• Rebecca Xiong

• SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits

Category:

• Paper

• Data portraits depict their subjects’ accumulated data rather than their faces. They can be visualizations of discussion contributions, browsing histories, social networks, travel patterns, etc. They are subjective renderings that mediate between the artist’s vision, the subject’s self-presentation, and the audience’s interest. Designed to evocatively depict an individual, a data portrait can be a decorative object or be used as an avatar, one’s information body for an online space.

  Data portraits raise questions about privacy, control, aesthetics, and social cognition. These questions become increasingly important as more of our interactions occur online, where we exist as data, not bodies.

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  4. F. Viegas, S. Golder, and J. Donath, “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories,” SIG CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montreal, Canada (ACM Press, 2006).

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  6. A. Dragulescu, Lexigraphs, www.sq.ro/lexigraphsr.php (2009) (cited January 7, 2010).

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  9. R. Xiong andJ. Donath, “PeopleGarden: Creating Data Portraits for Users,” ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), Asheville, North Carolina (ACM, 1999).

  10. A. Zinman, Personas, personas.media.mit.edu (2009) (cited January 6, 2010). u. Y. Assogba and J. Donath, “Mycrocosm: Visual Microblogging,” 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Big Island, Hawaii (2009).