Interactive Visualizations of Personal Experiences for Shared Sense of Understanding

Abstract

In an age of social media and polarized broadcast media in which the loudest voices and most extreme opinions dominate, we see democracy and truth challenged. In the face of this challenge, we at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication explore how we might leverage the capacity of cutting-edge digital technology to enable shared understanding within and across divides through prioritization of personal experience over polarized opinion and amplification of those often underheard. Pursuing this mission, we present Real Talk, a sociotechnical program in which scalable social and technological infrastructure equips communities with the processes and technology to connect, share experiences, collaborate, make meaning, address problems, and suggest and advocate decisions in a thriving ecosystem. Real Talk uses the age-old constructive communication practice of facilitated dialogues co-designed and co-developed with underheard communities to systematically create an audio-based living library of authentic voices, experiences, questions, and connections. At each step, from the design of the conversation guide to the voice storage and exploration tools, the knowledge of trusted community leaders with which we partner and the values and methods of constructive communication practices drive our design.Here, we share visual, interactive “maps” of the voices and stories from the dialogues collected in our growing civic infrastructure in Boston, MA with over 320 participants across 60 conversations. We share various means of “remembering” and exploring these voices, including interactive data visualizations, a public portal, and audio medleys through which readers might explore and interact with the voices and stories within the collection. We believe that such explorations and interactive tools exemplify how we might create new media based on personal experience to bridge divides, ground participants and listeners in constructive communication methods, and promote authenticity in exploratory media for shared understanding.

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