We might read a particular ideology in the design of Baltimore’s CitiStat room, which forces department managers to stand before the data that are both literally and methodologically behind their operations. The stage direction reassures us that it is those officials’ job to tame the streams of data — to contextualize this information so that it can be marshaled as evidence of “progress.” The screen interfaces themselves — those “control rooms in a box,” we might say — embody in their architectures particular ways of thinking and particular power structures, which we must critically analyze if we’re using these structures as proxies for our urban operations.
Critical Mud: Structuring and Sanitizing the Dashboard
Now that dashboards — and the epistemologies and politics they emblematize — have proliferated so widely, across such diverse fields, we need to consider how they frame our vision, what “mud” they bracket out, and how the widgetized screen-image of our cities and regions reflects or refracts the often-dirty reality. In an earlier article for Places, I outlined a rubric for critically analyzing urban interfaces. Here, I’ll summarize some key points and highlight issues that are particularly pertinent to urban dashboards:
First, the dashboard is an epistemological and methodological pastiche. It represents the many ways a governing entity can define what variables are important (and, by extension, what’s not important) and the various methods of “operationalizing” those variables and gathering data. Of course, whatever is not readily operationalizable or measurable is simply bracketed out. A city’s chosen “key performance indicators,” as Rob Kitchin and colleagues observe, “become normalized as a de facto civic epistemology through which a public administration is measured and performance is communicated.”
The dashboard also embodies the many ways of rendering that data representable, contextualizable, and intelligible to a target audience that likely has only a limited understanding of how the data are derived. Hookway notes that “the history of the interface” — or, in our case, the dashboard — is also a “history of intelligences … it delimits the boundary condition across which intelligences are brought into a common expression so as to be tested, demonstrated, reconciled, and distributed.” On our urban dashboards we might see a satellite weather map next to a heat map of road traffic, next to a ticker of city expenditures, next to a word-cloud “mood index” drawing on residents’ Twitter and Facebook updates. This juxtaposition represents a tremendous variety of lenses on the city, each with its own operational logic, aesthetic, and politics. Viewers can scan across data streams, zoom out to get the big picture, zoom in to capture detail; and this flexibility, as Kitchin and colleagues write, improves “a user’s ‘span of control’ over a large repository of voluminous, varied and quickly transitioning data … without the need for specialist analytics skills.” However, while the dashboard’s streamlined displays and push-button inputs may lower barriers to entry for users, the dashboard frame — designed, we must recall, to keep out the mud — also does little to educate those users about where the data come from, or about the politics of information visualization and knowledge production.
