Abstract

In her book Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez reflets on the fact that data about women is scarce as they are considered “more difficult to measure”. In medicine this is due to hormonal changes women go through in their lives and in transport, it is due to the complex and fragmented nature of their daily patterns. From this, it is not a huge leap to the conclusion that the mechanisms we have developed for capturing, analysing and representing data are not fully adept in unravelling and modelling the complexity and situated nature of lived experience. Similar limitations apply to children, whose experiences are highly contextual, embodied, and place-specific, and whose data, when produced at all, is often mediated by adults rather than generated by children themselves.

These limitations raise questions not only about what data is collected, but also about the methods used to elicit and represent it. Visualisation is usually used to communicate data from authorities to communities, but it is rarely used to capture people’s lived experiences. Local governments increasingly recognise that numbers alone cannot show how environmental health issues, such as air quality, affect daily life. Visual methods should therefore help surface lived experience and treat citizens as knowledgeable contributors, not passive audiences.

In her earlier work, Dr Mirela Reljan-Delaney explored the use of maps as elicitation tools for surfacing subjective, place-based knowledge. Through a series of map-based workshops with urban cyclists, participants annotated multiple renditions of familiar geographic areas. Analysis of these augmented maps revealed themes such as connectivity, scenic value, and temporality, illustrating how visual elicitation can foster deep engagement and uncover insights that are difficult to capture through conventional data collection methods.

In this talk, Mirela will draw on her experiences of capturing and analysing lived experiences to reflect on the challenges, ambiguities, and unknowns that arise when working with visual elicitation methods. In doing so, she will consider how these approaches, often messy and resistant to standardisation, diverge from traditional forms of data, and how they might nonetheless broaden what counts as evidence in civic and public health contexts.

How to join

In order to attend, please email Alfie Abdul Rahman (alfie.abdulrahman@kcl.ac.uk).