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Speakers

Santiago Ortiz

Santiago creates digital experiences that help people solve complex problems with data. He explores synergies between human and algorithmic intelligences. I develop interfaces that allow for exploration, combination, deep understanding, and decision making based on large, diverse and dynamic datasets. I have experience as a teacher, digital media artist, interactive data visualization researcher, data scientist, product leader and entrepreneur. moebio.com.

Talk Topic

The future of humanity depends on finding harmony within an ecology that includes matter and energy but also information, computation and multiple types of intelligences. While we learn, very slowly, to accept that other biological species are also highly intelligent, a new variety of algorithmic (or artificial) intelligences are becoming more ubiquitous and more integrated into human affairs.

In this talk I’ll introduce a variety of perspectives on intelligence. Seen as the emergence of information computation, intelligence exists everywhere in the universe, and here on Earth we see it at many scales: fundamental particles, chemistry, cellular and organism interactions. All forms of life, each species, each individual indeed, expresses intelligence in its own unique way. But we also see intelligence in algorithms, mechanical and digital machines. It’s also present in cities, information networks and culture. At each scale, for each system, intelligence mediates internal and external information, allowing systems to thrive, replicate, evolve or disappear.

Through interactive data visualization projects and ideas, this presentation aims to widen the concept of intelligence, and to point to ways we can create and collaborate with the new emergent ecology of algorithmic intelligences.

Rahul Bhargava

Rahul Bhargava is an educator, researcher, and designer who builds collaborative projects to interrogate our datafied society with a focus on rethinking participation and power in data processes. His innovative approaches to data in community settings include award-winning data murals, data sculptures, interactive data exhibits, and data theatre. Rahul has created big data research tools to investigate media attention, built AI-based tools that support activists monitoring news for human rights violations, designed hands-on interactive museum exhibits that delight learners of all ages, and run over 100 workshops to build data culture in newsrooms, non-profits, and libraries. He has collaborated with groups ranging from the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil to the World Food Program. Rahul’s publishes regularly in academic journals on data literacy, technology, and civic technology; his work has been shown at the Boston Museum of Science, Eyebeam in New York City, and the Fuller Craft Museum. Rahul is currently an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Art + Design at Northeastern University, where he directs the Data Culture Group. His first book, “Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information”, is coming this fall from Oxford University Press.

Talk Topic

Our standard toolkit of chart and graphs is poorly suited for the new community-oriented settings where data is now commonly used. Inspired by the arts, we can break free from outdated data practices and embrace creative, community-centered approaches that empower and engage people in public settings. Data sculptures, data murals, data theatre, and multi-sensory data experiences offer a broader and more appropriate set of approaches. Using this larger toolbox of data viz techniques can bring people together around data in ways that more fully reflect, embrace, and uplift their communities.

Lauren F. Klein

Lauren is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the Departments of Quantitative Theory and Methods and English at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab and serves as PI of the  Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. Before arriving at Emory, Lauren taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She received her PhD in English and American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center, and her AB in Literature (English and French) from Harvard University.

Lauren works at the intersection of data science, AI, and the humanities, with an emphasis on questions of gender and race. She is the author of several books, including Data Feminism (MIT Press 2020, coauthor Catherine D’Ignazio), which was named a “Must-Read Book for Spring 2020” by WIRED Magazine; and An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), which shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people, from the nation’s first presidents to their enslaved chefs, who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States. Her next major project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, coauthored with members of her research group, will be published in print and online by the MIT Press in 2024. With Matthew K. Gold, Lauren edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. The most recent book in this series is Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.

In previous incarnations, Lauren has worked as a web developer, educational technology consultant, music producer, and bike messenger. She says she has not, however, appeared on Law & Order, designed customized silver jewelry, or performed award-winning gymnastics routines. You can view her official bio here.

Talk Topic

“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” takes us back over two hundred years in order to show how data visualization was—and remains—a tremendous form of power. Exploring two historical examples, the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and “Description of a Slave Ship” (1789), created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists, I will demonstrate how the act of visualizing data always involves more than just turning numbers into visual form. What forms of information are captured by the data? Whose knowledge or experience does the data represent? What knowledge or experience does the designer bring to the visualization process? For what purposes, and for whose goals? These are some of the questions that this talk will engage. Together, they show how questions of ethics and justice have always been present in the field of data visualization, and how they continue to offer lessons to those of us who design and view data visualizations today.