Enthusiastic and Grounded, Avoidant and Cautious: Understanding Public Receptivity to Data and Visualizations.

Despite an abundance of open data initiatives aimed to inform and empower "general" audiences, we still know little about the ways people outside of traditional data analysis communities experience and engage with public data and visualizations. To investigate this gap, we present results from an in-depth qualitative interview study with 19 participants from diverse ethnic, occupational, and demographic backgrounds. Our findings characterize a set of lived experiences with open data and visualizations in the domain of energy consumption, production, and transmission.