ResViz: Politics and Design Issues in Visualizing Academic Metrics
summary
A university visualization called ResViz is built and deployed as a nightly-updated web tool that maps externally funded projects with an interactive cord diagram showing people, departments and faculties. A qualitative pilot uses 20 semi-structured interviews across managers, heads, research support and early-career staff. Findings list seven design issues: exploratory versus reporting uses, missing temporality, risks of stripping context and undermining managerial expertise, and positioning the system as a provocation rather than an authoritative metric.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction and motivation
- 3:52Context and system design
- 8:24Interview study and findings
- 10:53Design issues and tensions
- 16:14Implications and conclusions
- 18:42Q&A on design decisions
- 19:45Q&A on research differences
- 21:33Q&A on metric tyranny
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