Random notes from: Tapestry Conference on Storytelling with Data

Enrico Bertini (@FILWD) - Feb 27, 2013 Nashville, TN

Jonathan Corum, NYT

Jonathan’s portfolio: http://13pt.com/

Jonathan put up a recap of the talk at http://style.org/tapestry/ which includes most of the slides.

Think about who is your audience. Design for someone else instead of designing for yourself.

Axes:

Oversimplification <---> Too many details

Explanation <---> Decoration

Narrative <---> Exploration

Don't be your own audience

[Similar to Alberto Cairo’s classification in his Functional Art book]

Many examples on communication of scientific ideas taken from scientific journals. Amazing one of how a flea flies.

[People can actually have different starting points and it's important to support all of them, this is also true in visualization in general and related to my idea of selected first + expand.]

Add meaningful annotation, not just labels [Inspiring for Vis in general! How do we make labeling better? … Related to InfoVis 2012 paper on Just in Time Labeling]

Reduce tedium: interact with data not the interface [I think a lot of people still need to learn this]

Reveal patterns (make them apparent) [How can we do this (semi-)automatically in vis?]

How can I throw much of this away and still tell a story.

Apply common sense.

Quotes grabbed from twitter:

"Don't let the tool decide what the visualization is, make sure you use the tool,"

"Visualization does not equal explanation. There are patterns - explain them."

“Respect your audience. Respect the data. Apply common sense. Make/facilitate connections btwn points”

"Best way to learn something is to have a project for it." Big data set + need to share = new skills” [fully agree with this! this is very good advice]

Use common sense vigorously. Respect readers. Don't just visualize — tell stories. And do it for others.

Pat Hanrahan, Stanford

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/

Showing is not Explaining

My job is to teach things to people, that’s not different from what journalists do.Most of what I do is teach people how to think. Gist of the talk is: you cannot just show things you have to explain them.

Euclid’s algorithm (first known algorithm). The algorithm is more interestin1g than the data for a CS, e.g., “How does Google rank pages”. Greatest common divisor

One thing you have to learn is coding (Obama with Zuckenberg and Bill gates). Everybody should learn how to code - http://code.org  video mentioned by Pat Hanrahan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU1xS07N-FA … #tapestryconf. What Most Schools Don't Teach.

[Pat showing the algorithm on a python terminal live! How cool is this?]

Wikipedia has a nice visualization of the algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_algorithm

Problem with animation. Tversky (http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~bt/) studies it at Stanford

[Showing the steps of the algorithm with a visualization]

I’ve shown how it works but I didn’t explain WHY it works!

Recording and showing: I can show you the data but the data is not interesting. That’s only the first step! Recording and showing is getting really really easy with computers.

Q&A

Al lot of algo work is making it faster. Does visualization help making algos better? Some algos are very deterministic others are based on heuristics. You use heuristics because there’s no right answer. But in this way you can cheat and give the wrong answer. [Visualizing heuristic algorithms is a super interesting idea, we should try that].

What do you think is the role of algorithm visualization? The public should be aware of how we process these data and what we as CS people do.

Cheryl Phillips, Seattle Times

Choosing the right story

The first thing I want to focus on is story. The story is the starting point. What do you want to say? Is there anything surprising? What do you want to tell? Data without a theme is just a bunch of data not a story.

Click on a link showing the data and the result is a spreadsheet. How do you go about focussing on a story? “Interview the data” [I like the idea of “interviewing the data”].

(Story on methadone used as painkiller.) Tell the story from different perspectives. Tell multiple stories. Found through visualization higher density in areas with lower income, this triggered a new story to tell: “Methadone and the politics of pain”: http://video.seattletimes.com/1311237892001/.

Elephants dying in the zoo. Using an anecdote to tell a story.

Being open to possibilities. There are many elements to tell a story.

Q&A

Do you think people have lost the focus on story telling to to focus on technology? Not sure if it’s lost. I don’t know … Not sure.

Nigel Holmes

http://nigelholmes.com

Favorite graphic: the queen mary measured against other famous monuments.

How big is the moon? Moon compared to Australia. Putting things into a context. Real person vs. sculpture.

Number 29. No idea Jonathan was going to show the long jump graphics.

In 1968 something amazing happened: a guy (Bob Beamon) failed his first two jumps. Then he jumped 29ft 2.5

[Nigel shows 29ft with a rope. Wow!!!]

The reason why you can see this now is because it is in a different context. Context is the key here.

Mike powell broke the record in 1991.

Numbers are wonderful. Data is wonderful but context is the key to understanding.

How much toothpaste people use. Did a calculation. Relating things people can immediately grasp.

Hannah Fairfield, NYT

The Art of Honest Theft: Evolution of a connected scatterplot

We are all building on each other’s work. Show how graphics evolve.

Oil price graph from a paper found by Amanda Cox. We are so used to see time series that we are not used to see lines going backward. So she created “Oil’s roller coaster ride”. See how this is related to how much people drive “Driving shifts into reverse”. The price of gas has a lot to do with how much people drive. But there’s no loop in the graphic.

Now, we have done a couple of these, what can we do next? Keep the same horizontal line (miles driven per hour) and map the mortality on the y-axis “Driving safety, in Fits and Starts”. At what points are things changing?

The most important question in journalism: “what’s next?”

Snow fall the avalanche and tunnel creek. Influence from Hugo Cabret, it opens with drawings, introduces a wonderful visual story. Then there is tect and then drawing again, etc. Maybe we can have the same immersive feeling?

One of the skiers survived because he had an airbag. As you read the story you can see all in a sudden the figure of the guy.

Showing the skiers path. That was really challenging. There are so many names and you don’t know who is going to live or die. The graphics shows specific skiers. It gets very specific. We designed in many different ways. Always had the idea of the connected scatter plot in the back of my mind.

Q&A

How does the process work? More details? The snowfall piece was very collaborative. We built a lot of things you never saw because they never worked. Each piece had about 2 or 3 different people. On another piece we had real time simulation of the avalanche. An expert from Switzerland was able to estimate the size of the avalanche. We never work in a vacuum.

How much time you spend chasing the “right” data to be shown in something like a connected scatter plots? Part of it is following the news. In between the scatter plots I did hundreds of graphics. Have both the bread and butter and set aside some time for a playground: very important for all of us [true for me as well in research, little experimentation very important anf setting aside the time for it].

Bryan Connor

I came to vis from design school. People coming into this field could feel intimidated. Stefanie Posavec also mentioned to be intimidated by the field. The same sense of intimidation. There is a sense of right and wrong in visualization. Some people find it useful to point “wrong things” out.

There is so much history of visualization.

Explore, explain, entertain.

The loudest people: Tufte and Few

Example from branding world. It’s easy to judge visualization on a surface level. Goal of y-axis it to go deeper.

Critic, Designer, Audience [this is useful and important]

I am trying to look at visualization more closely. What is the decision making process. Why is this designed this way? Trying to get past this surface level judgment. Why? Why people created this visualization. Create an environment where critic is useful to anyone (audience and designer).

One of the most effective ways to create a good critic is to create a story about the visualization. You can come to a much deeper understanding and make it more useful.

[Visual literacy is a big theme and not sufficiently taken into consideration. We should all do more to teach people how to make but also how to read visualization.]

Robert Kosara

Visual Story Telling in the Age of Data

Research has great stuff but its stays in the circle of academics. Paper on storytelling: http://kosara.net/papers/2013/Kosara_Computer_2013.pdf

How can we communicate data more effectively. What can do to make a bar chart more effective? Monstrous costs from Nigel Holmes. That’s wrong! You are distorting the data.

But there are charts with no story. Lots of complexity and no narrative.

Of course there is a danger in telling stories.

There is a range in two dimensions: tell a story/doesn’t tell a story, story depth.

Simple charts: no story apth, nd no deInformation graphics: tell you something, Visualization: high depth no story.

Shifting waterways from Jonathan Corum: narrative, storytelling. It’s like a sequence in a comic.

Napoleon’s march chart

Is it an effective way to tell as story? It’s effective to show information.

These are ways to show you data points and see all of them at once. But there are examples where information is added incrementally. Walking through sequential steps can be very effective to tell a story [I have to remember that as a more general principle for visualization. We have been so obsessed with the idea of making overviews but that’s not the only way of showing data].

Showing gapminder: http://www.gapminder.org/

Showing all the data at the same time vs. going through steps

More depth …

Scatterplot from NYT: Man vs. Women weekly earnings. Many say people can’t read scatter plot. But just adding reference lines can make a scatter plots very readable.

Housing’s rise and fall in 20 cities: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/31/business/economy/case-shiller-index.html#city/IND20

You can add data and interaction and increase depth (several examples of reworked visualizations with Tableau). Adding small multiples on the chart.

Adding more data can be very effective. Exploding the bubbles in the gapminder chart you can tell a much richer story. Countries within a continent differ a lot!

But giving more data can also be dangerous: it could be overwhelming.

Focus …

Another, more complex, map of Napoleon’s march. There’s too much data.

Bush vs. Obama Administration (Job Loss) aka The Bikini Chart: http://eagereyes.org/blog/2012/bikini-chart

Information Scent …^[a]

The Jobless Rate for People Like You: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html

You can see one data points but many others in the background. This tells you there is more if you interact with it.

Showing unemployment rates in time for different cities. Some show some interesting spikes.

Information scent is a very powerful tool and not used enough in storytelling.

Author … and Audience …

What’s in the top right quadrant of the chart? Robert proposes Visual Data Stories.

Q&A

What is Tableau doing to get into this quadrant? We are trying to see what is out there first and then see what else we could do. But we think of a bigger community. This is a new way of telling a story especially online.

Scott McCloud

http://scottmccloud.com/

Amplification through simplification. In comics we write with pictures. The language takes many forms … Facial expressions: there are only 6 basic facial expressions. But we can mix them the same way we mix primary colors.

Showing a cartoon with 4 mixed emotions.

The Grimace Project: http://grimace-project.net/

“All pictures are words”

Do comics count as reading for kids?

Cognitive load time: how long it takes to load it in our mind.

RSAnimate: http://www.thersa.org/events/rsaanimate. I receive visual stimuli only when I need it.

Showing Scott’s daughter giving a talk. The notion of synchronization is important.

I am seeing a lot of people knocking at the same door.

We don’t really have to fill up all the space. If it takes 10 slide

Keynote by Jonathan Corum

• When we tell stories we adjust them based on audience - can't do that with a graphic
• Have an audience

• He partitions his audience into reader viewer listener user

• Focus on the people rather than the mechanism/content delivery vehicle
• A colleague think s of designing for bart simpsons vs lisa simpsons

• quick overview (Bart) vs ability to deep dive (Lisa)

• three types of people (science graphics)

• high school science student
• busy commuter - how to keep them interested instead of going to their phone, playing a game
• his grandmother - does it pull together as a cohesive visual whole?

• whole goal is to design for someone else

• tensions

• oversimplification vs. overwhelming detail
• explanation vs. decoration
• storytelling vs interactivity - narrative vs exploration

• don't be your own audience

• show ideas + evidence

• understand, translate, display, explain
• find the central idea. find one idea to use as the basis for your graphic

• respect the reader - help them through the story

• allow for multiple entry points - compartmentalized graphical sections
• interactive tools to allow reader to pace themselves through
• use disparate scales to give context. Example, mixing longjump distances with free-throw line

• add meaningful annotations

• close proximity between graphics and labels
• don't make people go back and forth between graphics and labels
• another way to provide context
• example: annotate each step in a sequence. flea jumping

• show change

• motion
• show large scale, small scale what's happening each step
• change in form is another kind of change

• reduce complexity and opportunities for confusion

• adding interface can be adding complexity

• reduce tedium

• interact with data, not the interface
• strip out tedious activities - usability

• visualization is not explanation

• dont let technology drive
• add enough information beyond your visualization to explain a pattern in data
• or structure your visualization to reveal and explain patterns

• reveal patterns

• layer multiple data sets

• respect the data

• show what's unique about it

• if your visualization can apply to something completely different, you might not be telling the unique story. detainees vs cups of tea
• edit - throw things away.

• throw as much away as possible but actually tell a story
• If you're spending most of your time editing you know you're on the right track

• apply common sense vigorously

Showing is Not Explaining, Pat Hanrahan

• trying to explain Euclid's algorithm for Greatest Common Divisor

• algorithm animation / explanation

• problems with animation

• motion is fleeting and transient
• cannot simultaneously attend to multiple animations
• ... more

• Pat showed the animation of the algorithm, but it didn't really explain how the algorim worked

I had trouble thinking of what to note for this one, would greatly appreciate contributions here.

Choosing the Right Visual Story, Cheryl Phillips

Side note: This seemed mostly aimed at journalists.

• What's the story?

• data without a theme is just a bunch of data - not a story
• who what when where why how - oldies but goodies
• interview your data. think of it as the man on the street. keep asking it questions

• avoid "notebook dump"

• don't put every last detail in the story

• use the nutgraf (theme) to help define a strong visualization
• data is more than numbers -- what little stories make up the larger whole which can be visualized?

• example: methadone the politics of pain
• example: family tree of songlaw

29, Nigel Holmes

My sparse notes here don't really do the talk justice, probably because I was enthralled with the presentation. Especially Nigel attempting the long jump - I doubt any of us will forget seeing that!

• 29 is not interesting in itself, but interesting in context
• you understand something when you see it next to something you already something understand
• context is the key to understanding

The Art of Honest Theft: Evolution of a connected scatterplot, Hannah Fairfield

• How graphics influence each other
• if you move away from plotting time against the horizontal you can reveal interesting trends

See Driving Shifts Into Reverse and Driving Safety, in Fits and Starts

• what's next?

• one technique: associate ancillary content (animations) with scroll

• so that extra information shows up in a way that it's tied to what the reader is reading at that moment (this idea shows up a lot during the conf) * focusing on immersive content * it's important to carve out time, even just 10%, to play

The Why Axis, Bryan Connor

• nick felt (?) was inspiration
• is a critic on the why axis, but doesn't mean that in a negative way
• "the finished piece frequently acts as a seductive screen that distracts us from the higher level of investigation"
• move past being psychics into being an investigator: as a critic, move from guessing to asking
• once you know the objective of the visualization you're able to judge whether it succeeded or failed
• designers: provide retros. be accessible to critics

Visual storytelling in the Age of Data, Robert Kosara

• academics don't get the idea of presenting data, communicating data. it's just an afterthought
• argues that stylizing charts is quite useful. helps to tell the story. emotional impact?

• example: monstrous data by Nigel Holmes

• there's a danger to telling stories

• can lead you down the wrong path

• example: driving an electric car in the parking lot until the battery runs down
• story telling potential of charts

• storytelling affordances (I love the idea of storytelling affordances)

• the form which lends itself to storytelling
• what are they?

• reading direction, left to right
• in the famous napoleon chart, the area gets thinner
• follow along a line, like following a journey on a map uses the driving safety in fits and starts article as example
• animations
• direction - the bush admin vs. obama admin us job loss bar chart effective way of walking you through developments

• narrative ties facts together

• provides causality
• walks you through a story

• facts - story depth
• focus - tells a story

• kind of the natural enemy of more data
• you must be selective in presenting data for it to be a story

• information scent - story depth

• hints used to guide people, indicate that there's more data. example: the jobless rate for people like you
• present a lot of information, but focus only on one bit. provide other data in a less visually prominent manner

• author - tells a story
• audience - story depth
• "we're at the cusp of something amazing and powerful that goes way beyond what's out there right now"

comics and visual communication, scott mccloud

• in a 10" cube box of air is information

• wifi, cell, radio
• until there's something to decode that air, it really is just empty

• we both receive meaning and create it on the fly

• the artist gives a hint of life, and the audience will meet them half way

• cartoonists

• simplification creating a kind of human calligraphy
• write with pictures

• human calligraphy takes many forms

• body language
• facial expressions

• there are six primary emotional expressions

• anger
• disgust
• happiness
• surprise
• sadness
• fear
• the six primary combine

• anger + happiness = cruelty
• you can paint on the face the variety of emotions

• the grimace project

• apparently useful for kids on the autism spectrum

• secret ingredient of the look of love is sadness
• all pictures are words
• all pictures speak
• all pictures have something to say
• something happens in lower grades - teach kids to write and to draw

• at a certain point we teach kids words can be used for

• lists
• poems
• express themselves

• but pictures - we try not to be too specific
• this overlooks the fact that pictures have a multiplicity of uses

• can transmit messages, emotions

• as a result we have a society that divorces pictures from... specificity?

• we have downstream pictures - advertising
• don't have as much going upstream

• comics are a way to send messages upstream - can go out to a mass audience but retain their subjectivity
• will eisner believed comics can teach

• the influencing machine

• tone is important

• readiness.gov spawned great parodies

• now people are empowered to combine words and pictures anyway they want to

• example: historical event facebook pages

• we need to be vigilant of cognitive load time

• the speed at which individual parts load is the speed at which we can convey complex info
• the rsanimate series, www.thersa.org

• synchronization of data/visuals with content

• "i'm not going to even allow you to think about anything other than what I'm talking about right now"
• order of presentation matters
• "if I don't need to think it, I don't need to see it"
• "the quicker the parts the richer the whole" cognitive load

• "form and content must never apologize for each other"
• the grammar of comics is putting one picture after another

• creating a flow of time between images
• as we move through space we move through time
• any two images, we'll find a story, we'll find a narrative
• cartoonists are finding the poetry in the gaps between frames

• as storytellers, you want your audience to lose themselves in the story

• all narrative art forms are based on extremely simple principles
• in comics: space = time

• "each successive technology would appropriate the previous technology as its content"
• grumpy old man rant about form factor

• we see the world as rectangles in landscape mode
• what possibilities open up when you consider the monitor to be a window?
• lots of cool examples of comics taking advantage of the possibilities inherent in browsers

• responsive web design

• separating content from presentation
• a noble impulse
• but at the same time there are art forms which are fixed. comics is one of them

• the form matters!

• in comics, the spatial relationship is part of the artistic intent

• when you have violent shifts in the landscape, the only thing you can do is hold on to basic principles

• in comics, people losing themselves in the story

Many thanks to the hosts for putting together a great conference. I'm looking forward to next year's!