If we want to understand the affective power of data in shaping our experiences of place, we need new forms of inquiry that reveal what data can do: not just for us, but to us. In this paper, we explore how engaging with data changes the way we feel about environmental concerns that we live with through an approach we call local data memoir. This approach brings together autobiographical making and writing with theorization through a phenomenological lens, specifically using the concept of orientation. We find that attending to our own orientation can be a useful means of tracking how our lived experiences are shaped by practices with data. Our contributions are two-fold: first, we demonstrate how the phenomenological concept of orientation can be used to interpret encounters with data; second, we introduce local data memoirs as a form of affective inquiry with data.

Sylvia Janicki and Yanni Alexander Loukissas. 2025. Making Local Data Memoirs: Changing Orientations in Relation to Environmental Concerns. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2047–2061. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735760

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