Anyone who works or studies in a university is likely to encounter a huge range of technologies in the course of their daily activities. These are technologies that help us communicate, collaborate and create, as well as store data, keep track of activities, assess performance, remind us of due dates, check for plagiarism, and more. Many of these technologies offer the capacity for increased surveillance, and some are already being used to monitor and/or quantify some of our activities.
The Data Stories Creator is a scaffolded storytelling tool that uses fiction writing to explore aspects of an interaction with technology, and hopes or concerns it raises, by speculating about what could happen.
The tool is divided into three sections:
Prompts: The prompts tab uses a set of questions to generate “seeds” for a story. Answer as many or as few questions as you like. Each answer will be saved and will appear in the mapping tab.
Mapping: The mapping tab lets you drag and drop story elements, connecting them with lines and labels to explore their relationships. Experiment until you have a map that contains key actors and interactions that might form an interesting story about data and surveillance futures.
Write: The write tab allows you to write a story using text and images, linking to videos, tweets and GIFs. You can create as many or as few sections as you like. Give your story a title, and write about current or anticipated experiences with educational technologies.
Once you have written your story, you can save it, and then (if you choose) submit it to be shared publicly on the Data Stories site.