Monday Night Seminar: Jaime Snyder
Schedule
Mon Nov 24 2025 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
The Centre for Culture and Technology - University of Toronto | Toronto, ON
About this Event
Join us at the Centre for Culture and Technology's Coach House for a Monday Night Seminar led by Jaime Snyder (Information School, University of Washington):
“Bespoke Encodings: Considering the value of radically personal visualization practices"
“How well did I sleep last night? How many steps do I need today? Will I feel better or worse tomorrow?” The expectation that questions about personal health and wellness can be answered with data is characteristic of our times. And from fitness apps to public health data dashboards, data visualizations play a particularly central role in our optimization-driven cultures of wellness. In fact, visualizations are often the primary way we see how our lived and embodied experiences are being made computationally legible within large and sprawling data systems. However, public-facing and consumer visualizations of personal data can be detached from intimate and embodied experiences of self and personhood. This allows standardized data representations to subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—influence what we think we know, and even what we consider knowable, about our own bodies, health, and wellness. These one-size-fits-all visualizations are not designed to help us reflect on personal experiences of datafication. They do not ask what it is like to be datafied. They do not challenge or expand our understanding of posthuman data semiotics. These are important things to consider at a time when black-boxed data analytic technologies have the potential to cast doubt on the authenticity of our embodied experience: I thought I slept well last night, until I looked at my app… In this talk, Grounded Visualization Design (GVD) methodology will be introduced as a way to challenge and subvert conventional analytics-driven approaches to visually representing personal data. GVD is a set of research-through-design techniques that enable stakeholders to use a visualization design process to reflect on the experience of datafication. Through GVD, stakeholders create personal, bespoke visual encodings using the same fundamental principles and elements as those used in digital visualization platforms. Social semiotic analysis of both the design process and the visual encodings reveals para-analytic and epistemic dimensions of datafication that are often obscured in conventional approaches to digital encoding data. A selection of GVD projects will illustrate how this process of creating personal visual encoding systems enables stakeholders to maintain control over what is known and knowable about their lived experiences, and also provides a holistic and visual lens for exploring the pragmatics and semiotics of personal data practices that lie outside optimization-driven analytics.
About the speaker:
Jaime Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE). She is also an affiliate of the Center for Behavioral Research in Technology and Engineering within the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology. Snyder directs the Visualization Studies Research Studio (VSRS), a collaborative research group that investigates image-making as a method for critical inquiry in information science and data studies. VSRS projects focus on areas such as public engagement in science, personal informatics, digital mental health, and health informatics for collaborative decision-making.
Snyder holds a PhD in Information Science and Technology from Syracuse University, an MFA in Visual Art from Stanford University, and a BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art. Before joining the iSchool at UW, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University’s Interaction Design Lab. Her development of the Grounded Visualization Design (GVD) visual elicitation methodology was supported by a US National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. She has also received funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), UW’s Royalty Research Fund, the Group Health Foundation, and the UW ALACRITY Center. Snyder’s work has been featured in leading HCI and information science venues such as ACM proceedings of CHI, CSCW, and DIS; ACM TOCHI; JASIST; Computers in Human Behavior; and Human-Computer Interaction. She has been recognized for her contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
About the Centre for Culture and Technology:
The Centre for Culture & Technology is dedicated to theoretical, aesthetic, and critical inquiry into the impacts of contemporary media on our interconnected world. This project is informed by the Centre’s location in the Coach House, a multi-use heritage building that was once Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s office and salon on the University of Toronto campus. The Centre draws inspiration from McLuhan’s humanistic intellectual and institutional legacy, continuing his stated goal of “investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies”.
The Centre promotes the study of media aesthetics in an expanded sense, examining the ways technological media shape contemporary experience by elaborating its histories, its problems, its infrastructures, and its politics. Offering both a setting and a framework, the Centre provides space and programming for scholars working in humanistic media studies across the three campuses of the University of Toronto and in the GTA. The Centre also supports the production of and conversation about contemporary media art, fostering aesthetic experimentation as a mode of inquiry.
Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto
39A Queens Park Crescent East
Toronto, ON M5S 2C3
www.cultureandtech.utoronto.ca
[email protected]
Instagram @uoftculturetech
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Where is it happening?
The Centre for Culture and Technology - University of Toronto, 39A Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, CanadaEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
CAD 0.00
