The Feeling of Numbers: Emotions in Everyday Engagements with Data and Their Visualisation

Abstract

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.

Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project

“…While previous work on crowdsourcing and gamification has emphasised the economics and labour of information production (Scholz, 2012), the Decoders projects suggest how 'microtasking' at Amnesty is not exhausted by its information-processing or labour-saving functions. Congruent with other recent studies (Kennedy & Engebretsen, 2019;Kennedy & Hill, 2017), these projects show how data projects can have affective dimensions. The forum plays a role in shifting emphasis from 'I' to 'we' as the subject of witnessing, and in making space for the collective articulation of experience and emotion, not just the instrumental production of evidence.…”

Audience-metric continuity? Approaching the meaning of measurement in the digital everyday

“…Nafus and Sherman (2014) call the experiences of this discrepancy 'soft resistance', whereas Pink et al (2018) reveal the anxieties and emotions of media users that emerge in the process of making metrics meaningful in their digital everyday. Similar arguments are advanced by Kennedy and Hill (2018), who use 'experimental visualisation practice, social semiotic analysis, focus groups, interviews and diary-keeping' (Kennedy and Hill, 2018: 834) to suggest that living with metrics means also developing a 'feeling of numbers'. Such a feeling produces everything from an 'intimacy of surveillance' (Ruckenstein and Granroth, 2020), or fears and pleasures of being tracked online, to attempts by users to manipulate algorithms and guide content display by imagining how algorithms may work (Bucher, 2017;Velkova and Kaun, 2019).…”

Encounters with Self-Monitoring Data on ICT Use

“…She was shocked by the amount of time that she spent on her smartphone. The reaction written her media diary points to the emotional responses evoked by the numbers and visualized data (Kennedy & Hill, 2017). In her media diary, she reflected on how she had acquired a habit of using the smartphone as a means to relax.…”