Data Collage
Inspired by a curricular intervention that I am co-designing with a team of researchers and a 7th-grade teacher, I used personal data about “time use” to produce a collage that illustrates how my time is divided between work and motherhood. The curriculum includes: a theoretical framework, 7th-grade learning standards, a 10-lesson unit plan, resources, and assessments. The students who participate in this project will be analyzing data on time use using the American Time Use Survey and their own personal time use data, collected daily. They will be analyzing images and text and evaluating how data are used to communicate claims. The students will develop arguments about their own time use and collect images to “concretize” their data. Through iterating on a digital collage, students will explore illustrations of their data, producing an artifact that communicates a data-based argument.
View PDF of Time Use and Data Collage Curriculum.
In Bach and colleagues’ “Narrative Design Patterns for Data-Driven Storytelling,” the authors suggest that data-based arguments are commonly communicated through comparison, concretization, and repetition. I’m positing that these strategies can be illustrated through the principles of design in collage — using contrast and juxtaposition (in color, shape, texture, scale), repetition of visual elements (text, image, symbol), and visual symbolism.
Process
In order to work through this process myself, I first created a data visualization of the “percent of the population engaging in household activities, by sex, per day” based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey (click image on left to enlarge). I sourced images from the Adobe Stock Library (a part of the Adobe CC Express library of images) using search terms such as “laundry,” “food prep,” and “dishwashing.” I started pasting these images into a bar graph based on the ATUS data. It was interesting to see what images were the first to appear - mostly women in their 30’s doing housework with a smile. I found it humorous that housework was being portrayed in such a joyful way (e.g. women gleefully smelling their laundry). There was a range of ethnicities represented, but not age or sexual orientation. My experience as a mom, wife, and PhD student is very different from these images - I am usually doing laundry while my daughter sleeps at night, hoping to god that the sound of the washer door shutting doesn’t wake her up. The lighting is usually dark and I look exhausted — a pretty big contrast from these images. This process helped me to think about what kind of images I wanted to collect. I ended up using vintage advertisements and other images from the past for my final collage. Jane Fonda represents “self-care and exercise,” and an old IBM console represents “work.” I think that I subconsciously associate these images with the home and the office, with motherhood and work, because they come from my own cultural memory.