In creating an academic paper, many hours of work are spread across planning, conducting research, analyzing findings, designing figures, and writing up the results. Ultimately, the effort can be obscured behind the final publication. For our recent paper for IEEE VIS, “Stitching Meaning: Practices of Data Textiles Creators,” we tracked every hour of work we did during its creation. Mirroring the topic of this paper, data textiles, where information is represented through fiber arts, we create a series of pieces using the data we collected on our time spent. Collectively, our ‘paper pillows’ encode three different views of our worktime in three textile mediums, representing our work as beautiful and practical objects. The act of making encouraged us to engage with our data from close and far perspectives that helped us to contextualize and reflect on our experiences, allowing us to live with and iteratively understand our data.

Tens of thousands of people have represented data by creating data-encoding textile pieces like blankets, scarves, and more. A prototypical example is the temperature blanket, which represents the weather through rows or blocks of different colors mapped to temperature ranges. While researchers have used fiber arts mediums to create exploratory projects, data visualization and physicalization research has largely not engaged with examples from this enormous and diverse community. We explore the space of data textiles, or fiber arts that encode information, by surveying creators (i.e., data fiber artists) on their projects and processes. We create a corpus of 159 examples of data textiles and present a schema characterizing the data encoding methods used in these projects. We also gather insights into creators' data workflows as well as their motives and discoveries through making with their data. Creators of data textiles use distinct processes to map their data, building fabric from component structures and substructures while using material properties like color and texture. From diverse data-tracking procedures, creators use and relate to data in varied ways. Working on these pieces also contributes to the creators' personal growth and data understanding. Our findings point to new opportunities for visualization, including opportunities to support fiber artists with tools formatted to their needs and opportunities to incorporate concepts from data textiles into other types of visualization (e.g., using texture, structural layouts, colorways).