What does it mean to be a digital humanist? With Quadriga University’s Professor Ana Adi

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

In the first episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks with Professor Ana Adi, Head of the Department of Corporate Communications, and Vice President of Quadriga University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Ana describes herself as a “digital humanist”, whose work focuses on online strategic communications. This includes both corporate social responsibility and activist communication, and she has a special interest and expertise in communication that features innovative and online-based research methods.

This conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 24 February 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Our discussion touches on how Ana works with data and how she overcomes the challenges of working with incomplete data sets. In a current project, she’s working with data from 25 countries in three languages. She’s following a well-established (and always-evolving) playbook that sees her move from qualitative to quantitative research techniques to boil down data into themes and ultimately insights.

To get there, she pressure-tests data using five key questions:

• So what; what do the data mean?
• Is what we’ve learned different from current understanding?
• What’s weird, different, or outlying?
• Who cares about these results?
• And what will those who care do differently as a consequence?

Ana’s compelled by the art and the science of digital forensics and what data we leave behind reveals about us and our attitudes to data. In the maxim of the father of modern forensic science, Edmond Locard, “every contact leaves a trace”. As a digital humanist, Ana’s interested in determining the value of every interaction we have with the digital world, every trace we leave.

When it comes to data storytelling, Ana is attracted to the approach taken by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath in their seminal 2006 book, Made to Stick, and their use of analogies, metaphors, epithets, and proxies. By keeping it simple and dialling up the emotion and humanity of data at the root of a story, we humanise it and make it relatable.

Outside of the day-to-day, Ana calls out the ways in which her perennial quest for balance informs her work and her life/work balance, with recent experience both painting and playing the piano.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Ana’s LinkedIn page – https://www.linkedin.com/in/anaadi/

Ana’s “Women in PR” podcast – https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/women-in-pr/id1484683946

Ana’s personal page – https://www.anaadi.net/

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