or perhaps as software? A dashboard may very well fit definitions of all these things and I will draw on them throughout the discussion as appropriate.
But while a dashboard mediates and this term (‘medium’) can act as an inclusive shorthand for all the things that constitute a dashboard, the term ‘medium’ no longer affords the analytical precision it once did. During the twentieth century, one could speak of ‘radio’, ‘television’, ‘film’, ‘print’ and so on, with some degree of confidence regarding the ontological distinctness of each. These diverse, mostly analogue technologies were given further coherence through the standardization that came along with mass production (and consumption). As is taken for granted in the field of media studies, the arrival of the computer as a communication medium, or what is broadly referred to as ‘the digital’, radically transformed understandings of media.16 The computer is able to absorb and ‘remediate’ the majority of previous media, altering their ontology (or materiality) while preserving their function and adding new qualities. As Lev Manovich has noted, the computer has become something of a ‘metamedium’, having subsumed all previous media.17 This metamedium is generative of dynamics that did not exist in previous media and/or is able to translate techniques from one ‘medium’ into a generic property of many others (such as ‘copy/paste’ or ‘zoom’).
The rise of the computer as a metamedium has also resulted in a shifting of focus regarding the territories of inquiry, which no longer adhere to the categories of analogue media (print, television, radio etc.). Manovich and others suggested a focus on software, while hardware, infrastructure, networks, platforms and interfaces have also all emerged as distinct areas of inquiry. These have not emerged through a master plan and thus they criss-cross and overlap in any number of ways. Software may include or even be an interface, while a platform may include hardware, software, infrastructure, interfaces and so on, plus a business model. I have no interest in redrawing the boundaries of these territories, but I do want to stress that despite any overlap, each does different kinds of intellectual work and makes possible forms of inquiry that at some point go in different directions. Each has its own historical trajectories, is attached to different forms of expertise and has its own privileged objects. All this is to note that there are methodological ramifications for assigning these terms to the things that spark our interest.
Contemporary dashboards are typically digital media and thus fall under the many logics of the ‘metamedium’. They are comprised of software and hardware; they have an infrastructure, including the aforementioned user-facing software and hardware as well as ‘background’ information systems or cloud services; they are typically networked; they may be found on platforms, be fed by platform data or otherwise be part of platform strategies; and they are constituted by a number of interfaces, with the graphical display the most visible and relevant for the current inquiry. Each of these elements of dashboards is significant in its own right and I will lean on them from time to time.
When I first began studying dashboards, I did so primarily through approaching them as a specific category of software or as a type of interface. Together, these were generally adequate, but neither quite did the work that was needed. There were two problems. Dashboards clearly exceeded the definitional limits of both of these terms, and neither got to the heart of precisely what dashboards are doing to data and the cultures in which these data circulate. For example, the majority of contemporary dashboards are interfaces and the people who make them either use ‘interface’ as a native term or are at least familiar with the notion. Interface positions the dashboard within the history of computation and general reflections about humans and machines. While Branden Hookway rightly locates the origins of the term ‘interface’ in thermodynamics,18 its history really gets going (for my purposes at least) with mid-twentieth-century talk of ‘man–computer symbiosis’,19 ‘man–machine interfaces’20 and the general emergence of human–computer interaction (HCI). Hookway’s claim that the interface is first and foremost a relation, where two things are brought together and where specific qualities of each are privileged and ‘augmented’, no doubt explains a lot of what dashboards do. However, if I was to take this as my primary orientating term, I would have to begin my study with dashboards as they appeared in computer systems, and this didn’t happen until the 1960s, which is much too late. I would also have to account for how the term dashboard ‘moved’ from carriages and cars to computers and devices, most likely by reference to metaphor or perhaps simulation. Part of what I want to suggest about dashboards, though, is a continuity across different media over time that is not mere metaphorical transferral. While interfaces dominate today’s dashboard landscape, the relation is not one-to-one over time. One could of course simply refer to pre-computational dashboards as interfaces, but to do so would seem overtly anachronistic (although I do recognize one cannot escape this issue of language and history entirely). Likewise, while the term ‘software’ does a good job of pointing to the contemporary analytics industries (with their different software offerings) and the technical specificity of most dashboards, it too has this problem of the dashboard’s pre-computational history.
As the inquiry developed, I increasingly found myself thinking with another term, not unrelated to ‘interface’ and ‘software’ or the other terms mentioned, but one that seems untroubled by the dashboard’s peculiar history or by the fact that dashboards can be comprised of radically different configurations of technology. More importantly, the term more strongly connotes what it is a dashboard does. Whatever else a dashboard is, I want to suggest it is a format. A dashboard is a format and the work it does is one of formatting.
What is a format? My understanding of format draws on three of its most common definitions:
1 the way in which something is arranged or set out;
2 the shape, size and presentation of a book or periodical;
3 computing: a defined structure for the processing, storage or display of data.21
A format is an arrangement, a way of arranging things. This arrangement includes shape, size and presentation, though (in our case) not limited to print media, and involves the processing, storage and display of data. While the third definition of ‘format’ also comes about with the rise of computation (like ‘software’ and ‘interface’), the other two definitions predate this one and together already contain much of the specificity I am looking for. Etymologically, ‘format’ comes from the Latin formatus, a past participle of formare (‘to form’). In book publishing, it originally referred to the size of a book (folio, quarto, octavo) and the ‘leaf’ folding and print strategies required for each size.22 While acknowledging this historical specificity, I will use this notion of format to approach the dashboard, and thus my emphasis is on the arrangement of elements (including size, shape, presentation and more) and the structuring of data through processing, storage and display, with a particular focus on display. I favour the use of ‘format’ over that of ‘medium’, ‘interface’ or ‘software’ because I want to highlight these questions of arrangement, presentation, structure and display.
A format is distinct from the medium, software, interface or other technology that realizes it. While some formats are limited to a particular medium, many even proprietary formats are compatible with different medial configurations. Common digital text formats such as .docx (Microsoft Word Open XML format) or .pdf (Portable Document Format), for example, can be read by many different kinds of software and their files ‘opened’ on different operating systems and devices. A format is thus dependent on some configuration of media elements, but it is not reducible to these elements. A format is ‘medium agnostic’.23 To focus on formats thus opens onto different historical trajectories where the advance of specific technologies need not take priority. That is, the history of a format is distinct from that of any particular medium. It may for a period run in parallel to the development of a medium – and we will observe this with cars and computers – but the format may just as well part ways with one medium and take up with another or persist
