London Dashboard

Viewers can scan across data streams, zoom out to get the big picture, zoom in to capture detail; and this flexibility, as Kitchin and colleagues write, improves “a user’s ‘span of control’ over a large repository of voluminous, varied and quickly transitioning data … without the need for specialist analytics skills.” However, while the dashboard’s streamlined displays and push-button inputs may lower barriers to entry for users, the dashboard frame — designed, we must recall, to keep out the mud — also does little to educate those users about where the data come from, or about the politics of information visualization and knowledge production.