Dialogues with Data: Multisensory Encounters with Objects, Texts, and Images

As scholars and curators turn to technological means for exploring the collections of libraries, archives, and museums, they increasingly turn to data visualization to express relations and facilitate search and discovery. At the same time, such institutions also offer ready typologies for encountering, interacting with, and discovering texts and objects. The gallery, the reading room, the performance space—to name just three—offer not only spaces, but a rich array of social forms and experiences. How can data visualization be brought into dialogue with the senses; with interaction, with civic engagement? Taking a series of recent projects as cases, we'll discuss how metaLAB explores data-driven creative works that are critical, multisensory, and grounded in dialogic encounter.