KIM HENZE

For my midterm project, I'm planning to make visualizations for a presentation I'm giving in Seattle for the Learning from Artists' Archives Project. We held an outreach day at the North Carolina Museum of Art last October where we taught artists basic archiving practices and discussed the value and legacy elements of studio archiving. We're hosting another outreach day in October 2016 at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, and together these workshops are meant to be a kind of model for other institutions/organizations wanting to put on similar events. For the second iteration and our recommendations for other institutions to be most successful, we implemented assessment surveys for the artists after our NCMA event.

My plan is to make visualizations of this data to include in my presentation, in handouts for conference attendees, and in the IMLS follow-up narrative to show what artists were looking for, what they liked, what they needed, etc. This is mostly qualitative data, but I can analyze the survey results into trends to represent that information quantitatively as well. I'll likely create graphs in tableau or something similar and edit all the information into an easy-to-read infographic-type handout for the conference. Visual clarity and design will be important because my audience is high on the spectrum of aesthetic/design literacy, but I'm also hoping to glean information from trends to inform our next iteration of the outreach day this coming fall.

FINAL POSTER:

Presentation Material:

Working with a small dataset in a very particular environment, so my focus was on using the CUT-DDV framework to build the most efficient visualizations for my specific context and situation

CONTEXT

  • Conference poster: static content, limited narrative, has to be legible to a skimming reader, valuable for a deep reader, but also useful for presentation, instigating conversation

  • Incorporated into standard poster sections: Intro, Objectives, Methods (into Project Timeline, Workshop, Studio Internship Sections), Results, etc.

USER:

  • ARLIS-NA/VRA joint conference: art libraries society of north america and visual resource association -- librarians, archivists, artists, and museum professionals

  • Have some but widely divergent understandings of archival issues

    • Needed to be understandable/useful at these levels, for different points of interest (some more interested in training new information professionals, others want to know about studio experiences with artists)

  • High standards of design, aesthetic sensibility - these are users to whom design matters

TASK:

  • Communicate structure, objectives, and workshops of ASA

  • Educational objectives (reforming curricula/field experiences for training info professionals in artists’ archives); training artists how to build, maintain, and preserve their own archives; build up a model series of workshops for artists covering basics of integrating archival practices into their studio workflow

DATA SET: What was most useful in visual form and what I had info/data for (to visualize):

  • A very small data set of survey results (mostly qualitative) that was given out to participants immediately following our first workshop. This data offers evaluation-type information on the workshop structure: what sessions were useful, what wasn’t, etc.

  • Also utilized project timeline as a means of tying together the various strings of the project (visualizing them together, seeing overlap).

DISPLAY+VISUALIZATION:

  • Had to stay within color scheme, font, branding of the project (found to be hindering for clarity/color blindness considerations)

  • Parts that lent themselves to visualization: chronology, session feedback (below)

Project Timeline: “Today” situated viewer with the progress of the three-year project; positioned the two-year durations of the two rounds of fellows and their activities (research, workshop planning, institutional internships, studio internships); showed iterations of workshops (NCMA in Fall 2015, Mint Museum in Fall 2016) alongside the cumulative symposium in Spring 2017

Infographic-style statement used to make the very big and obvious point that this is a useful workshop -- good numbers/visuals to take to stakeholders, supervisors, etc.

First: Applicability by Session: Percent who found each session "Very Applicable" on four-point scale of not applicable to very applicable.

Second: On the two sessions with breakout groups: number of attendees for each breakout group (to show what artists were most interested in/had greatest need for) and shading/color to show if they were happy with the material/content of each breakout group.

Careful to place these visualizations next to the overall structure of the workshop as a means of carrying the narrative over and making reference as I was presenting during our poster session or so they could reference back to the full structure if they were reading it by themselves during the week that it hung in the main space of the conference.

I coded the content feedback and decided to include the numeric values of each (12 artists said X, 6 artists mentioned Y, etc.) to give some context for the information but not to value one point mentioned over the others. For example, if I had the 12 artists said X larger than 6 artists said Y, that would place a greater value on X rather than Y, when in fact that isn't necessarily useful to the project because the workshops are trying to meet the widely-divergent individual needs of artists, even if only one artist at the workshop is a fiber artist focused more on community/network building than learning about software.

Finally, the poster presentation organizers wanted handouts. Because I was limited to printing my own black and white versions, I found that it was better to stick to an infographic-type display of benefits/takeaways rather than the explanatory graphs. The handouts are meant to be actionable items that the audience can take back to other interested parties/stakeholders as a way of justifying participation in/customization of their own workshop -- so after worrying about the clarify of the graphs and timeline in black and white (even after adjusting to more obvious shading and labeling), I decided to stick to a handout on the structure of the workshop and symbol-infographic of benefits of hosting a workshop, including the adjustments we'll make from the quantitative data (thus including its significance) in the text of the handouts.

Presentation also available HERE.