Writing Data: Atelier d’écriture et visualisation avec les données

10 mai 2022

Tommaso VENTURINI

prof. Tommaso Venturini, UNIGE

prof. Tommaso Venturini, UNIGE

Michele Mauri, PhD, Politecnico di Milano

In academic life, no challenge is no more difficult than writing a thesis and the first publications that constitute or follow it. Writing is hard and even harder when you have to mix conceptual arguments and data analysis, pay homage to the literature and show originality, propose new analytic approaches and visualize the results with convincing figures, seduce your evaluators, reassure your supervisors, stick to the subject and to the number of words. Luckily, for all of this, there are techniques, tricks of the trade and a workshop to master them.

Modeled on the "writing workshops" of Howard Becker, Bruno Latour and Umberto Eco, the Writing Workshop with Data offers a space for working collectively on thesis chapters, articles, research projects, etc. and to discuss together how to make the texts clearer and more lively, but also how to improve the communication of data through visualizations and tables.

Provisional programme

10 days before the workshop: participants submit their texts, visualizations and data.

Morning:

• Arrival of the participants;
• Introduction to the workshop and tour de table (presentation of the participants and their texts and visualizations).
• Exercises on texts and visualizations, at the level of individual elements (sentences, visual variables).

Afternoon:

• Exercises on texts and visualizations, at the level of the articulation between different elements (paragraphs, diagrams and graphs).
• Exercises on texts and visualizations, at the level of global coherence (operationalization and overall presentation).

Institut Confucius, Genève

Pedagogical approach

The concept is simple: participants send their drafts which become the material for a series of practical and guided exercises to improve the texts and the writing skills of the participants. The workshop takes into consideration all forms of writing (textual and visual) and explores their role not only in the presentation of results, but also in the staging of the research protocol.

Preparation

10 days before the workshop, each participant should submit to the facilitators:

1. A provisional title for the essay he/she has written or would like to write

2. A text of 2,000/3,000 words on his/her essay composed of:

- a short introduction presenting the object and objective of the essay;
- a short conclusion presenting the takeaway message of the essay;
- (optionally, excerpts from the essay that pose writing problems).

Drafts of texts in preparation and excerpts from previous articles or projects are perfectly acceptable.

3. A detailed description of the research protocol used or envisaged.

4. The dataset, or a sample of the dataset, explored or to be explored accompanied by a brief description. Qualitative data sets (eg, interview transcripts, observational notes) are perfectly acceptable but must also be submitted (at least a sample of them).

5. One or more diagrams or tables representing an aspect of the information contained in the data set or one of the arguments contained in the text.

The above items are collected and distributed to all participants, who are required to read them carefully before the workshop.

Objective and practice of the workshop

The objective of the workshop is to collectively discuss the conceptualizations, operationalizations and presentations proposed by each participant as conveyed in the texts, the research protocol and the data visualizations. Participants are encouraged to criticize each other, politely but nitpickingly, respecting two golden rules:

1. No substantial criticism is allowed. Participants should not question the substance of the arguments contained in the texts and visualization. The form of these arguments, however, can and should be carefully examined in order to highlight:

- ambiguities or lack of explicitness;
- inconsistencies between different parts of the texts and figures;
- verbosity or lack of efficacy.

2. No general criticism allowed. All comments must explicitly and precisely refer to a phrase in the text, a step in the protocol, a dimension in the dataset, or an element in the visualization.

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