Personal Data Comics: A Data Storytelling Approach Supporting Personal Data Literacy

Abstract

Most people interact with digital technologies that collect personal data about their behavior and experiences, leaving behind a data trail. The data within this trail is abstract and difficult to interpret; still, people often need to decide about its collection and distribution. Hence, it is paramount to support personal data literacy, for which data visualization approaches have been successful. These approaches focus mostly on data from single sources (e.g., IoT devices at home) or types (e.g., menstrual logs) and fail to capture people's situated knowledge. We hypothesize that creating data comics can address these limitations and support people in developing personal data literacy. In this paper, we explore how non-data experts create personal data comics, starting from simple data visualizations, and investigate their effectiveness and engagement in the context of pregnancy. Doing so, we identify comic elements that facilitate the autonomous exploration of personal data and provide design recommendations to support independent data comic creation.