About

This talk is a reflection of how working with communities has informed my understanding of data. Top down approaches of data collection, analysis and visualisation often lead to narratives that are disconnected from reality or lead to selective representation.

How do ground up practices of being present, listening, sensing and Co producing inform emerging narratives. Who owns these narratives, who tells it, who profits from it and what does it aid? This talk will look at my learnings from the following engagements

Pixelated memories

An engagement done in Gantiganahalli, a peri urban village in the outskirts of Bangalore focused on mapping urbanisation and how the village is transitioning.
In this project I facilitated mapping exercises on open street maps and conducted participatory mapping with children at the government library as a way to attempt community led counter mapping practices. The participatory mapping of the village resulted in an installation that visualised how the urban is making its way into people’s lives.
Nature of data: Geospatial data, maps, physical installation.

Channapatna health library

A community owned digital health library of people’s lived experiences built with front line health workers in Channapatna. The repository contains over 200 audio interviews. In this engagement we collectively co designed practices of data collection, ownership, informed consent, methods of tagging, annotating and writing metadata. The library as an artefact became a community owned archive health data, lived experiences and local knowledge
Nature of data: Audio interviews, its metadata, annotations

Local techno futures :

An engagement that speculates the possibilities of technology rooted in local contexts. I am working with a Ghungdi weaver from the Kuruba community in Bidar to co design and speculate how objects hold memory and tell stores. This is an ongoing engagement that is reshaping my understanding of data is and what stories they tell. I’m currently documenting the practices of the community throughout the year and how they intersect with livelihood and culture, how do practices of agriculture, jaathre, local deities, sheep rearing etc intersect and contribute to the act of weaving? How can these layers and intersections be visualised on the material?
Nature of data: Speculative, Data Visualization

Samagra Arogya

Samagra Arogya is a long term engagement in collaboration with 7 Gram panchayats in Kundapura. The main aim of the engagement is to understand social determinants of health. One of the initiative under it is a community palliative care program and I am working on co designing a decision support system informs methods of community driven methods for data collection, transparency, participation and decision making
Nature of data: Electronic health records, geospatial data

Takeaways (Insights and learnings in)

1. Understanding misrepresentation, underrepresention of data and its consequences
2. Community ownership, data storage and transparency
3. Informed consent, refusal, bias and advocacy in data
4. Data to feel, express and create.
5. Participatory methods and Co designing with communities

Audience

Anyone who is interested in data that impacts communities, self hosting and owning your data, creative visualisation and story telling with data that supports multiple literacies.

Bio

I am Abhiram Jois, a creative technologist working at Aruvu Collaboratory. I’m a graduate in Human centered design from Srishti Manipal Institute. I have previously worked with organizations like design beku and janastu. A lot of my practice involves designing and building technologies with communities. I dapple with data, code, art, servers, self hosting, working with communities, story telling etc.