Metaphors and 'Tacit' Data: the Role of Metaphors in Data and Physical Data Representations.

This paper explores (1) the role of metaphors in physical data representations and (2) the concept of tacit data: implicitly known data which are hard to uncover. In a semester course with twenty-three students, five teams explored how to represent self-chosen ‘tacit data’ in a visualisation, haptification, and dynamic physicalisation. Throughout these phases, our notion of tacit data evolved, resulting in a proposed working definition. Moreover, we noticed that metaphors played an increasingly important role. Based on analysis of students’ work and interviews with them, we found that tacit data and physical data representations need metaphors. For haptifications and physicalisations, metaphors help to circumvent limitations, curate data, and communicate to the audience. As tacit data were seen as ‘soft’ and difficult to quantify, metaphors made the data workable. Furthermore, tacit data benefit from physical representations, which offer further dimensions to represent the feeling and intimate aspects of data.