The Canadian Cultural Diversity Dashboard: Data Storytelling and Visualization for the Cultural Sector

ABSTRACT

The Canadian Cultural Diversity Dashboard (CCDD) is an interactive online data visualization dashboard designed to elicit insights regarding diversity in the consumption and creation of cultural expressions in Canada. While designed for a particular context it is broadly applicable. Urgency for this type of analytics has amplified given the negative impacts of COVID-19 on the cultural sector and mounting concerns around racial justice and inclusion in society, reflected in considerations regarding cultural funding and creation. The complex, scalable, heterogenous, and multivariate data sets that underlie the CCDD are sourced from demographic data and include factors such as age, geographic location, education level, literacy levels, immigration status, linguistic background and languages spoken, race, Indigenous identity, disability, and gender. Each demographic segment is analyzed according to cultural consumption and creative expression across a breadth of disciplines from literary, visual, to performing arts. We discuss the challenges of collecting, analyzing, and representing diverse demographic data, including biases in data collection. We implemented a dashboard interface to enhance user experience (UX), because similarly to visualizations acting as a repository for data, the dashboard interface is a repository for the visualizations. We considered the level of interaction and user engagement needed to explore this data which led us to the use of an interactive dashboard. A narrative visualization and infographics strategies are combined in order to support editorial layering and interaction design in a co-design project, allowing us to increase research in the application of these two fields. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.