This paper highlights the role that emotions play in engagements with data and their visualisation. To date, the relationship between data and emotions has rarely been noted, in part because data studies have not attended to everyday engagements with data. We draw on an empirical study to show a wide range of emotional engagements with diverse aspects of data and their visualisation, and so demonstrate the importance of emotions as vital components of making sense of data. We nuance the argument that regimes of datafication, in which numbers, metrics and statistics dominate, are characterised by a renewed faith in objectivity and rationality, arguing that in datafied times, it is not only numbers but also the feeling of numbers that is important. We build on the sociology of a) emotions and b) the everyday to do this, and in so doing, we contribute to the development of a sociology of data. 2.

This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers' belief that through visualisation, it is possible to 'do good with data' (Periscopic, 2014). We focus on four conventions which imbue visualisations with a sense of objectivity, transparency and facticity. These include: a) two-dimensional viewpoints; b) clean layouts; c) geometric shapes and lines; d) the inclusion of data sources. We argue that thinking about visualisations from a social semiotic standpoint, as we do in this paper by bringing together what visualisation designers say about their intentions with a semiotic analysis of the visualisations they produce, advances understanding of the ways that data visualisations come into being, how they are imbued with particular qualities and how power operates in and through them. Thus this paper contributes nuanced understanding of data visualisations and their production, by uncovering the ways in which power is at work within them. In turn, it advances debate about data in society and the emerging field of data studies.

As data become more and more ubiquitous, so too do data visualizations, which increasingly circulate online and are an important means through which non-experts get access to data. This paper addresses the factors that affect how people engage with data visualizations, a relatively underresearched focus in visualization research to date. Drawing on qualitative, empirical research with users, we identify six factors that affect engagement: subject matter; source/media location; beliefs and opinions; time; emotions; and confidence and skills. In drawing attention to these factors, we bring HCI concerns together with approaches to media audience research, to identify new themes for visualization research. In particular, we argue that our findings have implications for how effectiveness is conceived and defined in relation to data visualizations and how this varies depending on how, by whom, where and for what purpose visualizations are encountered. Our paper aims to extend the horizons of visualization research, in its focus on factors that affect engagement and how these suggest new definitions of effectiveness. Contents Introduction Research into engagements with visualizations Methodology Factors which affect engagements with visualizations Implications of findings for definitions of effectiveness Conclusion IntroductionAs data become increasingly ubiquitous (Kitchin, 2014;Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013), so do data visualizations -that is, the visual representation of data and datasets which communicates precise information and values. Indeed, the main way that 'ordinary,' non-experts access newly ubiquitous data is through visualizations, as Gitelman and Jackson note when they claim that data are 'mobilized graphically' [1]. It is important, therefore, to consider data visualizations as objects for critical scrutiny, not just as mechanisms to communicate data [2]. We do this in this paper by focusing on the question of how people engage with data visualizations. By 'engage', we refer to the processes of looking, reading, interpreting and thinking that take place when people cast their eyes on data visualisations and try to make sense of them. We propose that research about visualization engagement can learn from some of the approaches that are widely used in media and communication studies, especially in relation to audience research and their attention to factors (such as class, gender, race, age, location, political outlook, and education of audience members) which affect engagement with media and communications artefacts. Importantly, these factors extend beyond textual and technical matters. In data and information visualisation research, studies exploring the effectiveness of visualizations tend to define effectiveness quite narrowly, if at all, measuring it, for example, through accuracy, consistency or speed of comprehension. On the whole, such studies provide little information about who users are and how this might affect their engagement with visualizations. Also, they almost never consider the f...

Recent media reporting has highlighted that incidents of sexual violence frequently occur at live music events. Sexual violence has significant impacts on the health of those who experience it, yet little is known of how it impacts on everyday engagements with music, nor what measures venues and promoters might take to prevent and respond to incidents. Through interviews with concert goers, venue managers, promoters and campaigning groups, we investigated experiences of sexual violence at indie, rock, punk and funk gigs in small venues in one English city. We show that sexual violence at live music events significantly impacts on (predominantly) women’s musical participation. We argue that venues and promoters must work proactively to create musical communities that act as a defence against the normalisation of sexual violence, taking inspiration from safer space policies.

No abstract