Embodying Facts, Figures, and Faiths in Narrative Artistic Performances in Rural Bangladesh

2026-03-23

AI Summary

This study addresses how dominant data storytelling practices often overlook the cultural contexts of communities with low digital literacy, thereby reinforcing their marginalization. Through a ten-month ethnographic investigation across three villages in Bangladesh, the research examines traditional performative forms—such as Puthi, Bhandari Gaan, and Pot—and how they interweave factual content, emotion, and aesthetics to convey moral lessons and historical memory. Building on these insights, the work proposes a novel data narrative paradigm that challenges Western-centric assumptions by integrating pluralistic voices, Indigenous ethical frameworks, and local artistic practices. This approach offers culturally sensitive and technologically adaptive design pathways for human-computer interaction (HCI) and data visualization, particularly suited to low-literacy communities.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Data Visualization & Summarization

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in telling serious stories with data. Designers organize information, construct narratives, and present findings to inform audiences. However, many of these practices emerge from modern information visualization rhetoric and ethical frameworks which may marginalize communities with low digital and media literacy. In a ten-month-long ethnographic study in three Bangladeshi villages, we investigated how these communities use entertainment and cultural practices, namely Puthi, Bhandari Gaan, and Pot music, to instruct, communicate traditional moral lessons and recall history. We found that these communities embrace polyvocality and multiple ethical frameworks in their performances, construct narratives combining factuality, emotionality, and aesthetics, and adapt their performances to changing technology and audience needs. Our findings provide HCI, visualization, and ethical data practitioners with implications for the design of accessible and culturally appropriate ways of presenting data narratives in data-driven systems.

Problem

• data storytelling
• cultural practices
• information visualization
• rural communities
• ethnographic study

Innovation

• narrative performance
• cultural data storytelling
• polyvocality
• ethnographic HCI
• decolonial visualization