Creatively conventional: visualising data to represent the individual and collective voices of teacher educators

Data visualisations should do justice to the themes arising from the lived experience of participants who generously share their insights with researchers. This became apparent in a recent research project aiming to capture and communicate both the individual and collective voices of those who work in the field of teacher education. Working as a multidisciplinary research team, we came to understand and communicate the data via visual modes of analysis and representation. This gave us a way to connect across our traditional disciplinary vocabularies and bring together disciplinary methods. The fusion of data science and arts-based research methods opened up creative possibilities for us to consider aesthetics in data visualisation design, while realising the goals of our research. In this article we use creative text and visual shapes to align with the design of the research project. We explore approaches for macro and micro readings of the data. These readings needed conventional easy-to-read shapes (on a macro level) to represent the collective voice of participants; however, designing visualisations for multiple readings also provided a creative space to experiment with novel forms or representations (on a micro level) that recognised the diverse perspectives of the individual voices of those involved. These were not design issues alone, as we engaged with ethical considerations associated with the representation of our participants’ data and our own responsibilities as researchers. We highlight the potential of using creative methods and novel shapes to think differently about data and data visualisation as inscriptions of multi-dimensional human experience.