Making the Invisible Visible

A grid of 10 pros & cons titled: Possible benefits and risks of disclosing 5 kinds of invisible metadata. This set of potential benefits and risks is a sample of the list from out paper: "Making the Invisible Visible: Risks and Benefits of Disclosing Metadata in Visualization" at bit.ly/Metadata4Good . The information in the grid says: Data source - Benefit: replicability, risk: Loss of trust via mistrust of original data collector. Cleaning and Processing - Benefit: Increased credibility, risk: Undeserved critique; Visual encoding: Potential pitfalls - Benefit: Help reader learn where errors might occur, risk: Knowing about a problem doesn't stop it from occurring Visualization creator - Benefit: Understand whose perspective is represented, risk: Loss of trust via testimonial injustice Intended audience - Benefit: Justification for design decisions, risk: Alienate some readers

Led by: Alyxander Burns
pdf Making the Invisible Visible: Risks and Benefits of Disclosing Metadata in Visualization
Talk

Accompanying a data visualization with metadata may benefit readers by facilitating content understanding, strengthening trust, and providing accountability. However, providing this kind of information may also have negative, unintended consequences, such as biasing readers’ interpretations, a loss of trust as a result of too much transparency, and the possibility of opening visualization creators with minoritized identities up to undeserved critique. To help future visualization researchers and practitioners decide what kinds of metadata to include, we discuss some of the potential benefits and risks of disclosing five kinds of metadata: metadata about the source of the underlying data; the cleaning and processing conducted; the marks, channels, and other design elements used; the people who directly created the visualization; and the people for whom the visualization was created. We conclude by proposing a few open research questions related to how to communicate metadata about visualizations.