# Data Drama

Summary
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**Background of method**: “Drama conventions are ways of organizing time, space and action to create meaning. They allow all members of the group to participate in the drama in an organized and hopefully challenging way. Different conventions can allow for different levels of participation which often means that at one end of the scale individuals can contribute and participate without feeling that they have to do anything embarrassing.” Owens and Barber, 2000. Data drama has been conceived as a way to immerse people into a data story. In the data drama there is a pre-text drama that provides a context in which to explore data. It may be phrased as a condundrum that participants help to solve. There may be one or more people who script and act in role, whereas hte participants are free to play along as much or as little as they like.

**Why to use it**: data drama can be used to remove some of the fear that people may have around using data and to make the experience more playful. In addition, drama and stories may be useful for building empathy, for example towards environmental concerns. Finally, drama conventions may be used to mediate difficult discussions amongst people whilst avoiding conflict.

**When to use it**: it can be used when the goal is more about engaging deeply within a particular problem context than large scale data exploration. Data should be embedded into the drama in ways that fit the context and where the data can be understood quite quickly and without needing complicated tools. Interactive data comics are one method that have been used for this purpose.

# **Conducting a Data Drama**

**Overview**
* Time: several weeks to prepare costuming, make up, role character building, rehearsing of the role, framing into the context. Also understanding and preparing curation of data for use within the drama
* Purpose: to familiarise participants with different types of data and the types of questions it answers.
* Participants: Any age group and differnet types of skills and knowledge, but needs to be tailored to a context.
* Difficulty for facilitators: 5 stars 
* Difficulty for participants: 2 stars 
* Materials you'll need: A skilled actor, a skilled applied drama and theater practitioner as a pedagogue to facilitate the process, resources for theater scenery and props as well as data literature skills to make-sense of water quality data and to curate it to fit to a drama.

Description
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This activity will be descirbed through a past exmaple. There is a character Näkkitär who provides the focus for the Data Drama. There is also a drama pretext, in which Näkkitär has come from a future where water quality of a local lake is at risk. All she knows is that there are two possible futures, one where the quality remains high and one where it is more polluted. Näkkitär has some evidence in the form of water monitoring data between 1970 and 2020, that may help work out which future wil be reality, but she needs help to interpret it.

Näkkitär : Photo: By Lasse Kantola

Information is let out very slowly by the person playing the role (in this case Näkkitär) who carefully listens to contributions by participants and responds to signals from them and the applied drama and theatre pedagogue by using improvisation theater skills. Participants are aware of the person playing the Näkkitär-role and may well know them, but that person does not come out of role. The applied drama and theatre pedagogue collaborating with Näkkitär-character who uses the dynamic of the space between the participants and the role to create tension, as implications are carefully explored.

In this data drama, participants explore this data through the interactive data comics and relate it to Näkkitär using hand theatre, object theatre and painting - since Näkkitär also cannot communicate using language.

Preparation
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1. Download and print the game pack from [here](https://parcos-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Game-pack-3.7z).
2. Cut the cards and icons to shape or alternatively use a label template and sticky labels with wooden counters to stick them to.
3. Replicate according to the number of sets of opponents there will be (ie so each set of opponents has a full game set).

Running a session
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**Steps**
1. Facilitator framing dramatic challenge; Näkkitär needs help to make sense of the data, she cannot understand numbers and does not speak
2. Näkkitär is on stage, she slowly wakes up, points out the challenge to the participants, supports and develops the drama, and individuals in it, from within the drama.
3. Involves Näkkitär acting, requires conviction and the adoption of an attitude that can be shown in action.
4. Participants are led through differnet activities, with the help of other facilitaors in the room who interpret between Näkkitär and the actions to take, such as playing with data games.

**How to document**
Focus group intervention documented either by audio or video and participatory observation

**Analysis**
Etnodrama and ethnotheater

**Method originators:** Anne Pässilä and Annika Wolff

**Further Reading**
Information on the event can be found from [here](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3491101.3503561?casa_token=aDhYniOf1fIAAAAA:699w32Gae3ffGglJUGflC-S8AUh3GLRKoMpNbtGxACRXO7HNjS2d3mrGdoOPEj2yywXIWaMqCt1oRg).

Wolff, A., Pässilä, A., Owens, A. Kantola, (forthcoming 2023). Designing Data Dramas to build empathy to nature through collective acts, in: L. Heitlinger, S. (ed.) Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities –Beyond Sustainability, Towards Cohabitation, Oxford: Oxford University Press

###### tags: `datascape toolkit` `toolkit` `method`