About

Learn more about Joining The Dots

Joining The Dots

Joining The Dots is a research project concerned with the mapping and analysis of data related to housing, planning and property in Ireland. The work is being undertaken by Oliver Dawkins and is linked to the Data Stories project at Maynooth University.

Joining The Dots attempts to trace the links between data points, statistics, and the places they represent, in order to help better understand their relationships and tell their stories.

The Data Stories Project

Planning and property data are increasingly sought as a means to support evidence-based decision making and provide justification for local planning decisions and national government policies. At the same time, these data are also being used to determine private capital investments and shape public opinion about housing.

The Data Stories project is examining the politics, practices, and power operating within the planning and property data ecosystem in Ireland. Alongside traditional social science methods, the project is also engaging with artists to explore the use of creative and arts-based methods to inform novel forms of research-creation (generating research through creative practice) through the development of data stories told both about and with housing data.

While researchers on the Data Stories team have already been writing about the data and its wider ecosystem, Joining The Dots engages the question of working with the data, exploring it through the practice of hunting for datasets, building visualisations, establishing relationships, creating narratives, and exploring how that data and those stories work in context and on the ground.

Ground Truth and Situated Practice

In the fields of surveying, mapping and remote earth observation, ground truthing is the practice of taking local measurements and observations in order to verify and validate analyses conducted at a distance, or on the basis of less precise, less accurate, or secondary information.

The practice of working with data is often criticised from this perspective. However, in the demand for engagement with the local and particular implied by ground truthing as a metaphor for situated practice, what can be overlooked or silenced are the distinct practices and challenges of engaged data work, particularly regarding their mediation of the distant, the aggregate, the systemic, and the general.

How do planning decisions relate to planning policy? What factors impact the development of specific planning policies? How do those impact availability of housing? What does that look like to the person on the street and how does it impact them? Joining The Dots engages these issues by attempting to put the data to work.

Deep Mapping

The practice undertaken by Joining The Dots is influenced by research on the theme of deep mapping. Digital mapping has transformed the nature of maps from flat, static representations of space into new dynamic, interactive and collaborative forms of spatial media. These readily engage the quantifiable aspects of urban environments, but also increasingly afford engagement with more qualitative aspects of urban experience through the proliferation of digital media which engage multiple senses in the form of text, imagery, sound, video, digital maps and 3D models.

Joining The Dots seeks to achieve depth by taking a multi-dimensional approach to housing, planning and property in Ireland, layering datasets and juxtaposing different forms of visualisation, analysis and narrativisation to build a richer picture of the ways these domains interconnect.

Technology

This site is built with:

D3.js for custom data visualisations
Leaflet for interactive mapping
Svelte for reactive web interfaces
SvelteKit for the blog and site platform

Contact

For more information about the Data Stories project, visit datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie.