Using data stories to understand spatial mental models of data in natural science domains: Characterizing technical and social infrastructure

This qualitative, participatory study captures, describes, and characterizes participants' technical, social, and cognitive experiences with spatially-organized data. Participants included scientists, researchers, and software developers from a selection of natural science domains who shared how they navigated and made sense of spatially-organized data. A combination of qualitative methods was used to understand how participants conceived of large, multi-dimensional data using infrastructure. Adding to participants' cognitive load, natural science data has grown in size, quantity, and dimensionality as advances in technology allow for more data collection. A narrative mental model was found to be a common cognitive mechanism for understanding and assigning physical meaning to spatially-organized data. Data was represented and stored in many different formats, and participants applied theories from their domain, their previous experience, and software tools to map data as bits and numbers to spatially and temporally-located values. While this project focused on cognitive understanding of data work, impacts of social dynamics in academia and open source software communities surfaced through analysis. Gender differences became a salient feature as participants described vastly different experiences in their domains and larger research communities. Demonstrating that technical and social infrastructure cannot be separated, this finding traces how social and gender dynamics influenced participants' lived data experiences.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Informatics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Walkow, Samantha

Contributors dc:contributor

• Turk, Matthew
• McDowell, Kathleen
• Wickett, Karen
• Barley, William

• Mental Models
• Software Infrastructure
• Data Modeling
• Open Source Software Communities
• Gender In Academia

Statement dc:rights

• © 2024 Samantha Walkow

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124253

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124253