The eighth edition of Visualizar will focus on personal data

September 21 2018

DataLab Madrid organizes a new edition of Visualizar'18, a data visualization workshop. Its objective is to create a spaces for collaborative work, knowledge exchange and theoretical and practical training to investigate the social, cultural and artistic implications of data culture, opening up avenues for participation and criticism.

The meeting will take place from September 21 to October 5 at Medialab Prado. On this occasion, the event will revolve around the power of personal data. Citizens’ concerns about this issue continue growing in a year marked by the entry into force of GDPR or scandals such as Cambridge Analytica. Therefore, it is a good opportunity to develop projects that enrich the debate on privacy and the use of our personal data.

The workshop will have 3 parts: an opening day, a workshop focused on the development of ideas and a final presentation. The opening day will take place on Friday, September 21 and Saturday, September 22. Those days, organizers will introduce the workshop, the selected projects and the teams’ members, and the exhibition The Glass Room will be inaugurated. The following days, it will be time for the workshop, where the different groups will work together for developing their projects. The results will be presented on Friday, October 5.

The 6 selected projects are:

  • A-9. Black Eyes: The project consists of a video-installation whit a map that integrates roads from all over the world. The user can interact directly with the work by selecting any point on the map to view real-time imagen. The objective is to raise awareness about the power of information and its influence in a globalized world.
  • Microblogs and micropolitics: Participants will be able to export, scrape, encode and visualize, in an original way, the personal data that they daily produce on their public Twitter timeline. If time permits, the process will be repeated with data from public institutions and elected politicians.
  • My [inte] gration. This project seeks to change the perception of the migration crisis based on the data. Through big data and thick data technologies, the rights and needs of migrants, refugees, minorities and vulnerable communities will be analyzed, with the ultimate goal of creating spaces, cities and inclusive policies. Although the proposal focuses on the city of Madrid, it is intended to be scaled to other cities and regions.
  • Bad Data Challenge. During this Project, the participants will investigate erroneous data problems (that is, data sets that contain lost data, incompatible data, corrupt data, outdated data, etc.), using various tools and methodologies.
  • Personal Data Game. This project want to create a board game with modeled visualizations of personal data in order to raise awareness about this topic. Those data (physical characteristics, identification properties, social features, political ideas, etc.) will give rise to attractive objects that complement each other or not. The objective of the game is to cross the board keeping the greatest amount of personal data, protecting them from the enemy (who can steal or exchange them).
  • The big G and his henchmen. Those people who participate in this project will be able to develop a web tool to know what personal information store the different applications. Once this information is gathered, the participants will develop a webcomic to show how the devices collect data from users through mobile devices.

In addition, during the event various lectures and workshops will take place, as well as a meeting of citizen initiatives for privacy and personal data security.

Those people who wish to participate in visualize'18, can still sign up as collaborators. Registration, which is free up to 30 participants, will be open until Wednesday 19 at 23:59 CEST.