CHS:MEDIUM: Understanding Public Uses of Data and Dashboards

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Just as data-intensive technologies have spread in the business sector, so too have they increasingly been deployed by public institutions, including city, state, and local governments. Many public-serving institutions are currently expanding their capacity to create and use data by investing in infrastructure, hiring qualified experts such as data scientists or data engineers, and retooling their organizations to incorporate data gathering and data analysis into key processes. Central to these efforts are the production and circulation of "data dashboards". Dashboards are dynamic visual composites that summarize and collate data from multiple sources, and they serve as a primary site of the communication of data work to stakeholders and the public. Dashboards use graphical conventions to simplify and present the underlying data they represent, providing snapshots of civic activity derived from diverse data streams. By consulting data, publishing dashboards, and promoting this work to internal and external constituencies, public organizations hope to achieve more effective decision-making, competitive advantage over other organizations, more efficient allocation of resources, and greater understanding of the audiences they wish to reach. But public sector organizations differ from their private sector analogues in many vital ways and research to date has yet to fully explore exactly what public institutions mean when they aspire to make themselves data-driven, and the effects this has on public services and outcomes. This project looks at public-serving data work in general and dashboards in particular as sites of interpretation and contestation, as artefacts that embody arguments about the public interest. The project team uses ethnographic approaches to study how people in public administration put data to work. In particular, the project team examines the role played by data dashboards, including how they are developed and how they are used to communicate with the public. This research focuses on four related questions: 1) How are dashboards and visualizations incorporated into organizational processes of deliberation, communication, and decision-making? 2) How do dashboards circulate within and amongst organizations with a public service mission? 3) How do domain experts interact with dashboards meant to inform their work? 4) How does the public interact with dashboards meant to explain organizational activity? This project will give insight into the construction of dashboards by focusing on the conditions and sites where they are produced, on the the data professionals and other who design, code, and implement them, on the platforms that make them possible, and on the audiences who encounter and interact with finished visualizations. This project uses two sites of important public work: city government and public education. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.