Data Stories

Hannah Redler

Who are you and what is your role in the project?
My name is Hannah Redler Hawes, I’m the Associate Curator in Residence at the ODI and with art Associate Julie Freeman and exciting partners yet to be confirmed am co-curating the participatory art element of the project.
Why are you part of Data Stories and what do you hope to achieve?
I’m interested in data as one of the multiple means we use to ‘evidence’ and capture ‘realities’, revisit and even relocate presumed truths or facts and tell true or completely fictional stories. I love the ambition of the Data Stories project to involve communities in either telling their own stories using data or identifying ‘missing’ data sets that speak to their experiences. And of course as an art curator I love the fact that working with artists has been identified as a key means of achieving this.
CAN YOU TELL US AN EXAMPLE OF A DATA STORY THAT YOU CARE ABOUT?
I’m going to offer an art work by Julie Freeman as a great example of a data story. In 2014 Julie created weneedus.org,  a live, online, animated artwork that explores both ‘life data’ and the life of data. The work concentrates on metadata – data about data – which it draws from the activities of citizen science project, Zooniverse, to create sounds and animation. People assume the images have been generated by data, but it’s actually their behaviour and presence which is driven by the inputting, clicks and mouse traces of millions of people altruistically sharing their time and knowledge in the pursuit of shared science.