My name is Kathleen Norris and I am an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator within the doctoral program in Learning, Leadership, and Community at Plymouth State University.

An arts organization I work with was stuck when it came to program evaluation. They wanted it, knew they should have it, but didn’t know how to begin. We discovered that a large part of the challenge was that they did not have a way of talking about this fairly complex organization that could be understood by everyone in the organization.

Hot Tip: As we met to work on this it became apparent that the organization was the “sun” in an entire solar system with planets, moons, various gravitational pulls and distant stars. Once this metaphor was established, everyone could use it when talking about the organization and it helped to engage several members who had not previously contributed in our discussions. When new “bodies” came into the conversation, we could determine whether they were planets, moons, zooming comets or space junk, etc. Further work with the board and staff allowed opportunities for the members to draw (literally) what “mission” means to them, and then discuss the organization’s mission using the drawings they had created. Some sketched traditional California Spanish Missions, some identified with “Mission Impossible” and a variety of other meanings of “mission” and then we were able to talk about how their understanding of mission in general was like the mission of the organization and from there move to a deeper connection to the real mission of the organization. Now that we are engaging in a deeper analysis of the work of the organization, being able to categorize the work within the metaphor of the solar system, for example, has made the evaluation work seem less abstract and actually more fun.

This contribution is from the aea365 Daily Tips blog, by and for evaluators, from the American Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. Want to learn more from Kathleen? She’ll be presenting as part of the Evaluation 2010 Conference Program, November 10-13 in San Antonio.

Evaluation planning, metaphors, mission

My name is Susan Kistler, AEA’s Executive Director, and I contribute each Saturday’s aea365 post. I love finding ways to make data understandable and useful. My very first aea365 post was on Data Visualization and I gave a presentation at the 2010 AEA/CDC Summer Evaluation Institute on the Democratization of Data Inquiry (the handout, with links to example tools, may be downloaded here).

Today, I want to take a different tack and think about the intersection of art, data, and representation, being careful not to imply that beautiful graphs are not art (Tufte immediately comes to mind). Yet I hope to move beyond the printed page or the webpage through providing two examples from recent museum exhibits.

Lessons Learned: In August of 2009, I attended Roman Ondak’s “Measuring the Universe” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The performance exhibition consisted of having docents mark the name, height, and date of people entering a large white walled room, with each exhibit goer standing against the wall. The result was a compelling representation of participatory research in which each person contributed a data point to the resulting artwork which built over the course of a couple of months to depict the distribution of heights of New York city museum goers. My two pictures above do not do the exhibition justice – see the MoMA exhibit online for more information. I found the piece to be powerful as was the eagerness with which museum-goers, from children to seniors, wanted to participate and be recognized via measurement and recording.

Lessons Learned: In July of 2010, I visited The Tech Museum in San Jose. They had a small exhibit full of internally lit globes. Upon each globe, someone had painstakingly painted or brushed colors, added text and numbers, and illustrated a range of demographic data – the glowing yellow one above shows percent of the world’s energy use by region and the browner one is life expectancy. Again, my flat pictures do not do justice to the beauty and intrigue of the globes around which visitors from many countries walked or ducked or stood on tip toe to locate their selves within the broader context. Like the MoMA exhibit, the globes created a compelling expression of data in a way with which users wanted to interact and learn.

My question is to aea365 readers to ask if you have examples to share of data representation that bridged the gap between tables and graphs and artistic expression. What have you done? What has worked? Share in the comments section of this post (click back to the post online if you are receiving this via email or RSS), or send me an email at susan@eval.org and perhaps we can develop an exhibit space!

No tags