Project overview
The Creating Data Publics for Governance project examines how data generated through creative methods can inform decision making.
As decision-making structures for local, regional and national governments increasingly prioritise data and evidence as resources for governance, a critical challenge facing democracies becomes the creation of public spaces in which these data can be considered and debated to enable equitable and effective governance systems.
To explore this, we identified and analysed 30 projects from the UK and Canada where citizens generate and interact with data through creative and cultural methods to explore place-based societal issues and challenges.
The next step is developing the Creative Data Publics resource. This resource will summarise the different the UK and Canadian projects (the ‘cases’) and collect them so that they can be searched and the thematically grouped (as ‘collections’). Each case is an interactive visualisation using the stages and arrows of Leonelli’s knowledge cycle. The cases can be searched using keywords for the creative methods (e.g., photography; walking). The collections are thematic groupings which bring together the cases (e.g., similarities in who originates and steers the project). The project will offer some collections, and the longer-term goal is for users of the resource to suggest their own collections.
At this point we are bringing together researchers, policymakers and civic organisations through a Futures Forum to explore relationships between creative methods and decision making, and the emerging Creative Data Publics resource.
The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and UK Research and Innovation (UK) under the Synthesising research on envisioning governance systems that work scheme.
As decision-making structures for local, regional and national governments increasingly prioritise data and evidence as resources for governance, a critical challenge facing democracies becomes the creation of public spaces in which these data can be considered and debated to enable equitable and effective governance systems.
To explore this, we identified and analysed 30 projects from the UK and Canada where citizens generate and interact with data through creative and cultural methods to explore place-based societal issues and challenges.
The next step is developing the Creative Data Publics resource. This resource will summarise the different the UK and Canadian projects (the ‘cases’) and collect them so that they can be searched and the thematically grouped (as ‘collections’). Each case is an interactive visualisation using the stages and arrows of Leonelli’s knowledge cycle. The cases can be searched using keywords for the creative methods (e.g., photography; walking). The collections are thematic groupings which bring together the cases (e.g., similarities in who originates and steers the project). The project will offer some collections, and the longer-term goal is for users of the resource to suggest their own collections.
At this point we are bringing together researchers, policymakers and civic organisations through a Futures Forum to explore relationships between creative methods and decision making, and the emerging Creative Data Publics resource.
The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and UK Research and Innovation (UK) under the Synthesising research on envisioning governance systems that work scheme.
