Data Visualization:
Participant Work

The notion of digital governmental identification allows citizens a streamlined interaction with their government and subsiding institutions. Sadly, this concept is, in most countries of the world, a future scenario far from implementation. Simultaneously, digital identities are globally constructed by large-scale online platforms, credit reporting agencies, and consumer data brokers. The questions asked within the data visualization sprint on digital identity are: What kind of portrayal is constructed by our digital data traces? By visualizing and reflecting upon the data of search engines, social media sites, and digital platforms this sprint asks: What identity is represented and what is neglected within our online data traces? 

Abbas Bagwala, Chelsea Butkowski, and Jyotsna Iyer

Accelerated beyond expectation by the Covid-19 pandemic, digitalization poses challenges as well as opportunities to states and citizens worldwide. The process has generated new, unforeseen problems that need to be understood as urgently as they need to be solved. This project is an exploration of problems and uneven power structures associated with digitalization, especially those associated with the identities of people—these are the problems of digital identity. We explore digital identity through the lens of an emerging and intertwined system: digital banking and FinTech. Our digital finances tell stories about who we are while also requiring us to opt into digital systems that identify us through our data. We use a series of stories about individuals, focused in India, to suggest broader stories about the uneven impacts of digital identity systems.

Cesar Augusto Fontanillo Lopez, Eslin Özlem, Joseph Brandifino, Oskar Szydłowski

Digital space has introduced us to new places where we can explore different aspects of our identity. One of those places is social media platforms. One can be whoever they want on these platforms. Also, some people might feel these platforms are their safe spaces since they can be whoever they want and feel like these platforms know them much better than their close friends, family, and colleagues. With this project, we are aiming to understand the reason behind all of these ideas and dig into some assumptions that claim that social media platforms know us well. We explore the social media platforms’ profiling strategy and what they know about their users.