“Instead of focusing on open data sets, researchers can seek to create and understand open data settings: contexts in which things of public significance can be presented as evidence,” Loukissas and Ntabathis state in the abstract. “We share our experiences creating and analyzing open data settings for the Map Room Project, a research through design initiative that establishes local spaces for collaborative data exploration and mapping. Our contribution is to offer a conceptual framework through which researchers, as well as designers, might think about the openness of data settings.”

Loukissas also gave a keynote address on the same topic at the Visualization for the Digital Humanities (#VIS4DH) conference, which was part of the recent IEEE VIZ 2021 conference.

The full abstract for Loukissas and Ntabathia’s paper, as well as other Georgia Tech-sponsored papers at CSCW 2021, is available here.