The Butterfly at the End of the University

Abstract

This interdisciplinary work attempts to propose a radical way of treating a common challenge in information design and data visualization: missing data. Through an exchange among different epistemological fields, theories and methods, our work challenges the assumption that data should be clean or whole, and instead advocates for the possibility to treat missing data as its own knowledge object. We focus these lenses on the astrovisualization software OpenSpace that uses astronomical data from around the world to provide the general public the opportunity to travel through space during live, interactive planetarium shows. This data does not capture the full universe due to the limitations of current observational instruments, and narrators of OpenSpace planetarium shows fill the gaps with stories of why the data is missing. Our analysis of OpenSpace reveals an opportunity to use missing data as an opportunity to explore the story within the story – the reasons for the missingness in the first place.

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