Sensory Encounters in the Age of Computation

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the process of curating, cleaning, visualizing, circulating, and manipulating data to understand the persuasive force of visual information in multimodal media. From the history of haptic interfaces to the data practices of social media communities across the US and China, this thesis uses historical and ethnographic methods to understand how users of quantitative information encode norms about gender, ability, and race in data visualizations and search interfaces. This critical scholarship complements projects with engineering colleagues at CSAIL to build more inclusive data representation systems. Drawing on work in feminist technoscience, disability studies, and the history and anthropology of computing, this dissertation weaves together different forms of HCI research to ask what work can or should be done by data representations across computational media.