Vancouver's Data Art Visualization Youth Initiative (DAVYI): tomorrow's literacies today | Digital Media Learning Competition

Vancouver’s Data Art Visualization Youth Initiative (DAVYI) is designed to promote data literacy through visual arts education and civic engagement. It will provide Vancouver youth with unique opportunities to use visualization tools to interact with open data sets made available by governments and through the open data movement. Combining resources of Emily Carr University’s Social and Interactive Media Research Centre and Vancouver’s Arts Umbrella, a specialist in K-12 arts education, DAVYI will create curriculum and digital resources that activate youth involvement in the creative transformation of their city into a more vibrant, sustainable environment. Partnering youth and youth educators with working artists and designers, this project will investigate the convergence of contemporary art and design practice and scientific inquiry. In addition to instilling new technical, analytical, and critical skills in youth participants, this capacity-building initiative will produce vital resources for educators across a variety of constituencies: DAVYI will build an open source bank of teaching tools, techniques and documents, including youth visualization.

D.V.ATE comprises 3 interdependent components:

1. Resource Development (at Emily Carr):
- building open source visualization toolkits (using Processing) for educators
- developing visualization samples from open data resources
- technical and pedagogical research: teaching visualization, open data resources
- pedagogical skills workshops for Emily Carr student mentors and AU collaborators

2. Curriculum (at Arts Umbrella):
- program development and hosting
- course offerings: introduction to data art, visualization workshops for 2 and 3-dimensional
- documentation of new approaches to teaching art, technical and quantitative skills

3. Website
- visualizations gallery for youth participants
- collection of new, existing visualization tools for educators
- pedagogical materials—integrating data visualization into curriculum
- support network for teachers & students working on DVA projects
- youth-driven wishlist of data sets for governments to release

APPLICANT INFORMATION
Name: Glen Lowry
Country: Canada
Inst/Org/Co: Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Social & Interactive Media Research Centre
Collaborator #1: Alexandra Samuel, Ph.D. Director, Social + Interactive Media Centre
Collaborator #2: Gerhard Maynard Director of Programming, Arts Umbrella
Collaborator #3: Sadira Rodrigues, Dir. Continuing Studies, Emily Carr University
Collaborator #4: M. Simon Levin, Emily Carr University
Collaborator #5: Jer Thorp, Emily Carr University
Requested Budget Amt: $150,000