Along with the storylabs team (Richie, Ramya, Priti) at Gramener, I organized a dataroom exhibit at the Agami Data Summit. The audience at the summit is tilted towards legal domain: lawyers, startups, researchers, fellows, policymakers, open data practitioners.

Given the audience mix, we picked the recently released India Justice Report data on infrastructure, human resources, diversity among other aspects by Tata Trusts. We picked gender diversity data (a subset of the entire data) and exhibited two data properties: 1) physical data visualization aka Let’s Pin It, 2) interactive data comic with augmented reality.

Let’s Pin It!

The intention was not to individually assess how much participants know like a conventional quiz format and award the winners. The intention was to understand how public perception.

Let’s Pin It! had set of three questions. Participants have to guess the answers in each section. Answers are revealed at the end of the quiz.

Question 1

I was closely involved with first question: how many of the 702 subordinate courts have zero women judges?

Few participants guessed wildly, understandably.

Several of the women participants guessed a higher number compared to several men who guessed a lower number. While we considered gender based markers initially but decided against it as it’d introduce other logistic challenges.

A lawyer who was sure that every subordinate court had at least woman judge was surprised to know that there are over 100 courts without any.

Question 3

Rate three district courts (Bengaluru, Haasan, Ramanagara) in terms of % of female judges on a scale of less to more.

As someone who doesn’t interact with the legal system at all, had I attempted the quiz I’d have fared poorly too.

Feedback

We’re sharing some of the feedback we received during the exhibit below.

“When we say data people remember computers. Thanks for making us interacting with the data, physically.”

“It’s a fun exercise”

“Made me think a lot”

“Thanks for creating this, good way to create awareness”

Final thoughts

Public communication is a critical mechanism for the data folk (data analysts, data scientists, consultants, designers etc.) to realize how common folk perceive information.

Communicating and thinking through comparative relations (less to more), percentages is hard. And it gets complex in a domain where data is not commonly available.