Carl Chineme Okafor is at this time a 2nd year doctoral candidate in the Department of Media and Social Sciences at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Datafication in the social arena, through the smart city is his current research focus.

In this seminar, he discusses the ideation of his 3rd PhD article, focusing on the practical relation between Stavanger (Norway) smart city and the volumes of data it generates in datafication. He approaches this data relation and the questions it generates through the format or setup of the data analytical dashboards in the city’s control rooms.

In this case, if ‘dashboards are objects of visual perception’ (Tkacz, 2022) of data, does it mean that they have autonomy to inform their users? Consequently, he wants to understand how dashboards facilitate a specific relation with data and engage municipal workers in the Stavanger smart city to take decisions from their display of formatted data. Is this an autonomous act?