Sensory Encounters in the Age of Computation

This dissertation investigates the process of curating, cleaning, visualizing, circulating, and manipulating data to understand the persuasive force of visual information in multimodal media. From the history of haptic interfaces to the data practices of social media communities across the US and Ch...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lee, Crystal
Other Authors: Jones, Graham M.
Format: Thesis
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2023
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/147500
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6672-9118
Description
Summary:This dissertation investigates the process of curating, cleaning, visualizing, circulating, and manipulating data to understand the persuasive force of visual information in multimodal media. From the history of haptic interfaces to the data practices of social media communities across the US and China, this thesis uses historical and ethnographic methods to understand how users of quantitative information encode norms about gender, ability, and race in data visualizations and search interfaces. This critical scholarship complements projects with engineering colleagues at CSAIL to build more inclusive data representation systems. Drawing on work in feminist technoscience, disability studies, and the history and anthropology of computing, this dissertation weaves together different forms of HCI research to ask what work can or should be done by data representations across computational media.