People of ACM - Sheelagh Carpendale

June 9 , 2026

After studying art & design and working in the arts professionally for 10 years, you switched gears and earned a BSc in computer science. What is an example of one important skill that an artist brings to data visualization?

There are many factors from my art and design education that have been important in my research and my work in data visualization. In fact, I often think that I do better in science because of my arts background. However, to pick one factor that I think has been particularly important is creativity. While it is widely recognized that the best scientists and technologists are extremely creative—note the new innovations, new inventions, new insights, etc. However, while art school and design school teach one how to be creative and how to practice and exercise one’s creative abilities, such teaching is not common practice in computing science classes.

One design school creativity technique that I still often use is the idea that a great way to arrive at an excellent solution is to first generate as many solutions as possible without judgment during the generative phase. Then, once many possible solutions have been generated, choose the best. This has been studied and shown to be effective. The trick is to postpone judgement during generation of ideas. Judgement, even, perhaps particularly, our own self judgement, can hamper creativity. Apply choice and selectivity after generation.

You’ve cited a 30,000-year-old bone with a lunar calendar etched onto it as an example that humans have been making data visualizations for a very long time. Why do you think many people feel uncomfortable with data now? How might we create greater ease for people in this regard?

It is apparent that through the ages, since ancient times, that data has persistently been part of our lives as humans. We have examples such as the Lebombo bone (~41,000 BC) and the Dordogne bone (~32,000 BC) with intentional marks that are thought to be people tracking their menses cycles thousands of years before written language. This private, personal use of data persists in current times, to use the same example, at the onset of menses, an individual’s “right-of-passage” still likely involves beginning to keep the data to track their own menses. Similarly, but in current times, the Smithsonian has over 6,000 images of people scratching tallies to mark the passing of days on their prison walls.  As individuals, our use of data is nearly always private, often small, but continually forms a part of how we live our everyday lives.

The question about why many people feel uncomfortable with data these days is complex. I think that there are several contributing factors.

One: Part of the problem may be the word data itself. Perhaps people do not think of their personal records as data—though they are. Now, and through the ages, we probably didn’t refer to what we gathered as data. We might have more casually thought of it as “keeping track” or “keeping records” or maybe as collecting information. Also, the word “data” means “given” and this is actually a misnomer—all data is gathered or collected by humans or machines or technology. To reflect this, some researchers, such as J. Drucker, suggest that it would be more appropriate to use the word “capta” whose Latin root suggests “capture” instead of “given” as inferred by Latin root of the word "data.”

Two: Another alienating factor is the use of the phrase “big data,” which is often discussed in terms of volumes too big to conceive. Big data is also commonly associated with big industry, big government, and now with AI, where recent success is at least in part due to the sheer volume of data available on the web. Thus, in their everyday lives individuals may not think that “big data” is for them.

Three: Also alienating is the social structure of how data is gathered and used on the web.  The web-based digital social society has not followed our hard-won ideals about democracy, equality, and liberty. If I were to ask you, “Who are the Data Barons?” you would immediately know. And who are the data serfs? In J. Owyang’s terminology, most of us are data serfs. Thus, using any of the existing technologies to hold your data (about relationships, children, birthdays, triumphs, disappointments, etc.) means you are giving to the Data Barons, and some people might be uncomfortable about this. In fact, as we are witnessing in court cases involving harm to our children, this discomfort may be growing.

Four: From a critical perspective, while the use of data has been lauded in many ways, including its potential for supporting better decisions and better health outcomes, its use has also caused negative outcomes such as marginalization and surveillance pricing. In these directions, D'Ignazio and Klein are leading a vigorous discussion often referred to as data feminism.

Five: Related to the critical perspective, but articulated differently by GIDA, the Global Indigenous Data Alliance, are the CARE principles for Indigenous data governance, where “C” stands for Collective Benefit, “A” stands for Authority to control, “R” stands for responsibility, and “E” stands for ethics. More colloquially, this is often discussed as “nothing about us without us.”

Six: The FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) principles, as published in Scientific Data, suggest all data should be managed and stored accordingly. However, while I agree that the FAIR principles are extremely important, they do not touch on the over-arching issues of who has collected this data, who is storing and controlling this data and who is benefiting from this data, as well as who is suffering, overlooked, or marginalized by this data use. To give just a couple of examples, note Caroline Criado Perez’ book Invisible Women that discusses how, largely through use of data, half of our population is being excluded in our current world which has been largely built by and for men. There’s also Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction which points out how thinking that technologically produced answers are correct can exacerbate inequality.

This list goes on, but these few examples make the point that people have lots of reasons for being mistrustful of data, big data, and our society’s use of data. In one of my recent card-based interview studies with people from different walks of life, we, broadly speaking, noticed four different attitudes towards data. There are people who have solid footing in the data world and want to do their own data querying and interpreting; there are data enthusiasts who are keen to be shown the data and would like help interpreting it; there  are data cautious who want help to be able to tell who and what sources to trust; and there are the data-avoidant, who are definite about not wanting or needing more data in their life.

Ways of creating greater ease with data is also a very big question, and it is research I am deeply involved in. I am working towards helping people gain benefit from data through their own use and control of their personal data by thinking about their personal data, their own personal data visualization, and their own data empowerment.

How has the sheer volume of data in the past few years impacted interactive visualizations? 

Without a doubt, the volume of data poses all sorts of challenges for visualization. One of these challenges is that the sheer volume may tempt us towards choosing quick or easy visualization, when we still need to be thinking about developing an appropriate visual representation that reveals the contents of the data. However, if we focus on the adage of researchers Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay and Ben Schneiderman that “visualization is the use of computer-support interactive visual representations data to enhance human abilities,” we can persist when working with huge data to discover bespoke visual representations that help us gain insight from our data. 

Will you tell us a little about your project combining scientific data and sounds from Antarctica to inspire musical composition?

This initiative which resulted in the project Antarctic Waves was definitely a highlight in my career. It was led by Terry Braun and Gabi Braun of Braunarts who had the vision, obtained the funding, and set up the collaborations with the British Antarctic Survey and the London Philharmonic and were instrumental in all details throughout the project. This project involved inventing new interactive visualizations to create engaging experiences which could inspire high school students to compose music based on science. We drew upon the visuals and sounds from the British Antarctic Survey’s scientific results combined with the understanding and intuition about how music can be created from the London Philharmonic to invent new types of interactions that made it possible to compose music inspired by Antarctic Science. The goal was to create an interactive tool to inspire musical composition. Among other awards, Antarctic Waves won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award. The criteria for this particular award is the most effective use of offline interactive media for education. Antarctic Waves, designed to inspire students to compose music based on science, was distributed to all high schools in the UK.

What’s another trend in interactive visualization or human-computer interaction that hasn’t received enough attention?

Currently, there is a strong tendency for technology to be designed to benefit a company’s bottom line—that is, to improve some company’s ability to make money. The resulting benefits for us as individuals tend towards either making us more efficient in the workplace, or to intrigue us sufficiently to allow better and broader collection of data about us—again in service of some company’s ability to make money.  Many other goals are possible. Recently with several colleagues we discussed how we now have the technological capabilities to create tools that, in effect, give people superpowers. We explored the intersection of superhero comics and interactive visualization to point out the many possibilities in this vein. Let’s create technologies that literally empower us!