Designing Data: Students Transform Data Sets into Art

This week, visit The Stacks to witness an act of magic situated at the fertile intersection of the quantitative and the creative: data springing to life.

Student artwork from Professor Mia Cinelli’s A-S 541: Advanced Graphic Design course will be on display in The Stacks through May 6. During an opening reception on April 29, students discussed their work with attendees over light refreshments. 

From habitable exoplanets and hydrangeas to winning Kentucky Derby silks and the experience of eight first dates, the students' work shows an astounding range of possibilities of data visualization, celebrating the often wild ways that numbers and values can transform into shape, color, texture, and story. 

The class of 11 advanced graphic design students found, assembled, or created datasets large and small, which they represented pragmatically, narratively, or poetically.

“Data sets can tell many different stories. The challenge facing designers is to discover the kernel of the story embedded within the data: what is the data telling us? That kernel then informs the aesthetics of the visualization,” said Cinelli.

“Part of what this medium can do is to reflect and expand on the data set,” added Research Data Librarian Isaac Wink, who collaborated with Cinelli to bring the exhibit to fruition. “The design brings forth information in ways that can subvert expectations, reveal preferences, and present illuminating dissonances. It’s a powerful way to interact with data.”

Some student work is interactive, allowing users to zoom in to fine-grained details. Other work is printed and mounted. All promise to demonstrate the capacities of a medium growing ever more important for making sense of our world, from the cosmic to the highly personal.

“Collaborating with SAVS students to put on this exhibition has been wonderful for demonstrating the endless ways to explore and present data,” said Wink. “Our mental image of a data visualization is often an Excel graph, which limits imagination somewhat on how data can be presented. Mia's students have pushed past those limits, creating visualizations with original structures that still faithfully convey the underlying data. I was honored to get to contribute my feedback on structure and storytelling to these pieces.”

“It's been such a joy to work with Isaac and UK Libraries to put together this exhibit,” said Cinelli. “One of my favorite things about teaching at the University of Kentucky is how interdisciplinary collaborations can create new connections, opportunities, and resources for students. My students have been hard at work on projects showcasing their unique interests – from lists of read books to the characteristics of US Air Force planes. I can't wait for visitors to see their final works and learn from their data visualizations.”

With more data available than ever before, UK Libraries plays a critical role in providing and guiding access to high-quality datasets and sources across an astounding range of subjects, from climate data and public opinion polls to health statistics and 16th century sermons, and everything in between.

Start on your own with the data collections that UK Libraries makes available to all users:

• Sage Research Methods: Learning modules and sample datasets for learning data analysis methods, organized by subject area.
• ICPSR: A home for social science research data, including a wide variety of surveys. UK Libraries' institutional membership allows researchers access to the full suite of search tools, including data enhancements and curation support.
• Roper iPoll: An aggregation of survey data from a wide variety of pollsters and made available in many file formats. This is an ideal data source for digging into public opinion on a vast number of topics or adding context to a paper or research project.
• HathiTrust Research Center: Structured textual data for more than 18+ million volumes from libraries around the world, along with a suite of tools for building collections of volumes and analyzing them at scale.
• English Corpora: Collection of English-language texts that enables researchers to investigate topics such as the frequency of certain words or phrases or shifts in language over time. 

Our librarians can also guide you to the data you need by navigating open data sources:

• Data.gov: The centralized home for accessing more than 300,000 open data sets produced by the federal government, covering an astounding range of subjects from climate and environmental data to economic indicators to public health statistics. Visit our Open Data Sources guide for additional data portals for US states and local governments.
• National Center for Health Statistics: A resource for building estimates of disease prevalence among the US population, with the ability to examine trends over time and stratify by demographics and geography.
• Generalist data repositories such as Dryad, Zenodo, and Harvard Dataverse are all great options for locating research datasets – or for sharing data of your own.

Our Digital Scholarship & Data Librarians provide tailored assistance at every stage of the research lifecycle, offering data support services that help users create, share, and manage their research data.

With specialized software and equipment in The Stacks, we can help bring data to life with analysis, visualization, and modeling tools.

Browse data sets available to UK researchers by subject and find books on data visualizations.