We’re delighted to be hosting visiting researcher Yanni Alexander Loukissas (Georgia Tech) for a series of events and exchanges co-organised by the Department of Digital Humanities and the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London.
Yanni will give a public talk on “Data as Experience: From Representation to Orientation” on Wednesday 2nd December 2026, 5-7pm, followed by a workshop on “Drawing Your Own Maps / Making Public Data Settings” on Friday 4th December 2026, 3-5pm. All welcome! ✨
These two events draw on his forthcoming book Data as Experience: Technologies of Orientation within a Living World. We hope Yanni’s visit will be an occasion to gather researchers and students of critical data studies, science and technology studies, design studies and associated fields, alongside artists, designers, journalists, activists, community groups and others interested in critically and creatively working with data.
More about Yanni and the two events can be found below. Please do share with friends, colleagues and groups who might be interested in joining.
Data as Experience: From Representation to Orientation
Wed 2 Dec 2026 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Embankment Room, Macadam Building, Strand Campus, King’s College London, WC2R 2NS
Data matter experientially: not only for what they show us, but for how they shape our attention and affect, conditioning the way we perceive our surroundings, others, and even ourselves. And yet, established representational approaches to data, which are centered on objectivity and accuracy, can obscure these experiential dimensions and limit our ability to reflect critically on what data do to us. Data are not simply representations of the world; they are points of orientation within it.
Grounded in first-person accounts of collaborative work constructing public data settings—around environmental concerns, such as sea level rise, wildlife preservation, and microplastic pollution—this talk offers an experiential theory of data across five dimensions: settings, attention, affect, interaction, and aesthetics. This theory reframes both discourse and design for data as well as data-driven systems, including emerging AI models. It shifts the central question of data from representation (what do data show us?) to orientation (how do we orient ourselves in relation to data?).
Drawing Your Own Maps / Making Public Data Settings
Fri 4 Dec 2026 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
REACH Space, Strand Campus, King’s College London, WC2R 2LS
So, you want to draw your own maps? First, ask yourself, what does it mean to make a map yours?
Join us for a free hands-on workshop to explore how your maps can:
- incorporate personal experiences, as well as established sources
- reveal different perspectives, as well as common ground.
We will explore the use of Map Spot, an open-source framework that supports the creation of large-scale collaborative maps that are digitally guided but drawn by hand using pens, markers, and paint on paper. Map Spot is a research project at the Center for Interdisciplinary Media Arts at Georgia Tech that explores the potential of “public data settings” — spaces that support participants in deciding:
- what counts as data.
- who can use data.
- what claims data can support.
No technical background or prior mapping experience is required.
With Yanni Alexander Loukissas, Kat Macdonald, Jonathan W. Y. Gray and Georgia Panagiotidou.
Yanni Alexander Loukissas explores how data shape and are shaped by their settings through the development of critical methods and theory that challenge the myth of digital universalism. With an interdisciplinary background in social research, computing, and architecture, he brings a spatial perspective to Science and Technology Studies scholarship on data and AI infrastructures. Loukissas is the author of All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (MIT Press, 2019), which explains how to analyze “data settings” rather than data sets, and the forthcoming book, Data as Experience (MIT Press, 2027), examining data as points of orientation in the world, rather than simply representations of it. Loukissas holds a BArch from Cornell University, as well as an MS and PhD in Design and Computation from MIT. He is currently an Associate Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and Executive Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Media Arts at Georgia Tech.