Nathaniel Tkacz - Being with Data

Figure 0.2 Photo of Qlik dashboard.

Source: Author.

Dashboards are worthy of attention because they are designed to produce precisely the relation or ‘way of being’ with data introduced earlier. The degree to which any particular dashboard realizes this relation is of course contingent and can only be determined empirically, but an attempt to do so is written into dashboard design. In fact, as I hope to show, it is in part through the development of the dashboard as a format that this particular way of being with data emerged. That is, the very idea that data can be brought together on a single display as a cognitive aid, and can change along with the unfolding of a situation, is heavily indebted to the format of the dashboard. 14

Figure 0.3 Screenshot of image search query results for *dashboard*.

Source: Author.

Moreover, as data have spread further into the contours of everyday life, so too has the dashboard as a format. As recently as ten years ago, talk of dashboards was largely limited to the automotive industry and business/IT management. Following the development and general adoption of this format into new contexts, then, offers a different narrative line through the contemporary discourse on data. If we entertain the notion of a ‘data revolution’ 15for a moment, dashboards are literally on the front lines of this revolution. They make this data revolution accessible and intelligible; they tame it, put it in context, give it form and make it useable. Without deflating discussions over AI and machine learning, or downplaying concerns over surveillance and profiling, what would it mean to put this ‘ubiquitous’ but overlooked actor at the centre of this data revolution? What kind of story might we tell if we focused on the most common ways that people consciously encounter data in their everyday lives?

What kind of thing is a dashboard? Beyond an initial definition (data, display, cognitive function), what category of thing does it belong to? What kind of conceptual apparatus is able to handle its specificity; its diverse historical threads and peculiar ontological status? Because a dashboard mediates our relation to data, should we approach it as a medium? Or is it only one component of a medium or larger system? Is it to be understood instead as an interface, or perhaps as software? A dashboard may very well fit definitions of all these things and I will draw on them throughout the discussion as appropriate.

But while a dashboard mediates and this term (‘medium’) can act as an inclusive shorthand for all the things that constitute a dashboard, the term ‘medium’ no longer affords the analytical precision it once did. During the twentieth century, one could speak of ‘radio’, ‘television’, ‘film’, ‘print’ and so on, with some degree of confidence regarding the ontological distinctness of each. These diverse, mostly analogue technologies were given further coherence through the standardization that came along with mass production (and consumption). As is taken for granted in the field of media studies, the arrival of the computer as a communication medium, or what is broadly referred to as ‘the digital’, radically transformed understandings of media. 16The computer is able to absorb and ‘remediate’ the majority of previous media, altering their ontology (or materiality) while preserving their function and adding new qualities. As Lev Manovich has noted, the computer has become something of a ‘metamedium’, having subsumed all previous media. 17This metamedium is generative of dynamics that did not exist in previous media and/or is able to translate techniques from one ‘medium’ into a generic property of many others (such as ‘copy/paste’ or ‘zoom’).

The rise of the computer as a metamedium has also resulted in a shifting of focus regarding the territories of inquiry, which no longer adhere to the categories of analogue media (print, television, radio etc.). Manovich and others suggested a focus on software, while hardware, infrastructure, networks, platforms and interfaces have also all emerged as distinct areas of inquiry. These have not emerged through a master plan and thus they criss-cross and overlap in any number of ways. Software may include or even be an interface, while a platform may include hardware, software, infrastructure, interfaces and so on, plus a business model. I have no interest in redrawing the boundaries of these territories, but I do want to stress that despite any overlap, each does different kinds of intellectual work and makes possible forms of inquiry that at some point go in different directions. Each has its own historical trajectories, is attached to different forms of expertise and has its own privileged objects. All this is to note that there are methodological ramifications for assigning these terms to the things that spark our interest.

Contemporary dashboards are typically digital media and thus fall under the many logics of the ‘metamedium’. They are comprised of software and hardware; they have an infrastructure, including the aforementioned user-facing software and hardware as well as ‘background’ information systems or cloud services; they are typically networked; they may be found on platforms, be fed by platform data or otherwise be part of platform strategies; and they are constituted by a number of interfaces, with the graphical display the most visible and relevant for the current inquiry. Each of these elements of dashboards is significant in its own right and I will lean on them from time to time.

When I first began studying dashboards, I did so primarily through approaching them as a specific category of software or as a type of interface. Together, these were generally adequate, but neither quite did the work that was needed. There were two problems. Dashboards clearly exceeded the definitional limits of both of these terms, and neither got to the heart of precisely what dashboards are doing to data and the cultures in which these data circulate. For example, the majority of contemporary dashboards are interfaces and the people who make them either use ‘interface’ as a native term or are at least familiar with the notion. Interface positions the dashboard within the history of computation and general reflections about humans and machines. While Branden Hookway rightly locates the origins of the term ‘interface’ in thermodynamics, 18its history really gets going (for my purposes at least) with mid-twentieth-century talk of ‘man–computer symbiosis’, 19‘man–machine interfaces’ 20and the general emergence of human–computer interaction (HCI). Hookway’s claim that the interface is first and foremost a relation, where two things are brought together and where specific qualities of each are privileged and ‘augmented’, no doubt explains a lot of what dashboards do. However, if I was to take this as my primary orientating term, I would have to begin my study with dashboards as they appeared in computer systems, and this didn’t happen until the 1960s, which is much too late. I would also have to account for how the term dashboard ‘moved’ from carriages and cars to computers and devices, most likely by reference to metaphor or perhaps simulation. Part of what I want to suggest about dashboards, though, is a continuity across different media over time that is not mere metaphorical transferral. While interfaces dominate today’s dashboard landscape, the relation is not one-to-one over time. One could of course simply refer to pre-computational dashboards as interfaces, but to do so would seem overtly anachronistic (although I do recognize one cannot escape this issue of language and history entirely). Likewise, while the term ‘software’ does a good job of pointing to the contemporary analytics industries (with their different software offerings) and the technical specificity of most dashboards, it too has this problem of the dashboard’s pre-computational history.