Data Self-Portrait : visualização de dados pessoais segundo uma perspectiva auto-etnográfica

Abstract

The portrait as a symbolic representation of individual identity tends to reflect the social, cultural and technical context in which it is created. In the current historical moment, where technological mediation is omnipresent, data portraits appear as forms of portraiture that propose to evocatively represent the identity of individuals based on their personal data, which are generated as by-products of their daily activities and registered by technological devices of everyday use. Following this conceptual framework and technical context, this study aims to explore the creative possibilities associated with the concept of data portrait as a mechanism for representing and expressing individual identity. To this end, the study begins by circumscribing the concept of data portrait, addressing the context of its emergence, its functions, and how they are configured as aesthetic artifacts. In order to delimit this notion and extract instruments for an analysis of its concrete manifestations, the associated concepts of portrait, autoethnography, data, visualization and computation are discussed. Following this, it examines a set of works that, implicitly or explicitly, reflect the notion of data portrait through different creative approaches. Based on this framework, the Data Self-Portrait project is developed, aiming to explore visualization methods capable of producing a self-portrait generated from personal data related to the subjects’ daily activities, according to a autoethnographic perspective and as a reflection of their identity. In this manner, this study seeks to highlight how data portraits become relevant as creative experiments developed around the representation of identity and the way it is shaped by the current cultural and technological context. It also seeks to contribute to a discussion about the ways of conceptualizing portraiture and to understand how the proliferation of digital data and the dissemination of computational media present new creative possibilities to explore portraiture as a representation genre