Visualizing Support Through Speculative Digital Spaces

Rape culture permeates all facets of society. It is a culture wherein sexual violence, especially sexual violence against women, is treated as a normal and acceptable part of our daily lives. While we know that rape culture impacts many people, over the past few years we have seen and heard first hand accounts of the impact of rape culture in an unprecedented way. Social media has become an important space for those impacted by rape culture to share stories of sexual violence and harassment with viral hashtags from #YesAllWomen to #MeToo. While these stories have provided insight into the ways in which rape culture permeates society, wholistic spaces of support have not manifested themselves in online spaces in the same way. Through my work I will demonstrate how the visualization of affective, qualitative data can be used to consider what wholistic spaces of support can look like in a digital context. I will discuss the development of my research-creation project What Do You Need? as an example of how non-traditional data visualization can be used to explore the diversity of ways that people imagine supportive and empowering environments. What Do You Need? is a visualization of imaginative spaces of support that uses participant submitted visual data to make computer generated collages. Through participatory design methods and a combination of collage and computation I explore how multidisciplinary approaches to qualitative data visualization can be used to gain insight into complex issues