Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The PolicyViz Podcast
193 Plays10 years ago
Welcome to the PolicyViz Podcast! That’s right, I’m moving my random audio blob posts to a more structured podcast. In these podcasts, I will chat with my guests primarily about data visualization, presentation skills, and presentation design. I’m also hoping...
The post The PolicyViz Podcast appeared first on PolicyViz.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Policy Viz Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the Policy Viz Podcast, and I'm John Schwabisch, and I'm here in my very first episode with the one and only Alberto Cairo. Alberto, how you doing?
00:00:20
Speaker
Hey, I'm fine. How are you? Good, good, good. Welcome. Thanks for coming. First episode. Thank you for having me. I'm trying to convert this lazy man blogging over into a podcast, so we'll see. That's a very smart idea. We'll see how it goes. It saves a lot of time. It does save a lot of time.
Ethics in Data Visualization
00:00:39
Speaker
So I thought we might chat a little bit about ethics in and around data visualization, since it's a hot topic these days.
00:00:47
Speaker
with all these new data journalism sites like Vox and FiveThirtyEight. I know you've written a lot about what it means to steal other people's work when it comes to data visualization. So I thought we might just talk about that for a few minutes and see where it takes us. All right. Well, let's go. So let's start with this one that came out of this little Twitter
00:01:12
Speaker
What would you call it? Twitter explosion a few days ago with Archie Zay from The Times showed a graphic that The Economist had published and then Vox just sort of lifted it. Repurpose it. Repurpose it. That's the polite way to put it. Yeah, that's the polite way of putting it. So you spend a lot of time paying attention to this. So you think this happens a lot?
00:01:33
Speaker
well i don't i don't really know a i don't know i mean if the fact she reacted that way on twitter if you get the he doesn't do that very often now he's been the nicest guy in the world so my feeling is that if you reacted like that is because he has he has seen that they have been happened quite a lot and if you think that if that is the case it's a really worrying trend because in my opinion is pretty obvious that
Fair Use vs. Copying in Journalism
00:02:00
Speaker
If you're writing a news story or some sort of interview or whatever it is that you're writing and you want to use somebody else's work, you need to get permission. It is different if you are commenting on
00:02:21
Speaker
the graphic itself. So if you do it for educational purposes, there is a case to be made that if it's actually, I believe that is built into the law actually, that if you publish something with the intention of using it as an educational example or commenting on it, that is fair use. And that is the way I do it. So if I want to price someone's work,
00:02:45
Speaker
I may ask for permission, but sometimes I really don't. I just put it online and they say, this is great or perhaps this could be done this other way or whatever. If you do it for educational purposes, then it's fine, I believe. But obviously, if you are getting something from the economist, a graphic that they published to write a news story about exactly the same topic, well, obviously, that is not acceptable. You need to pay your rights or reproduction rights.
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, in a sense, it is stealing. And if it is a trend, it's really worrying, right? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I can't imagine that a news organization would steal someone's text without attribution. But it seems like stealing someone's graphic, you know, people may seem like, well, that's okay. Yeah.
00:03:32
Speaker
There's a lot of gray area here. When you use somebody else's words,
Attribution Issues in Graphics
00:03:40
Speaker
if you want to use a paragraph or something like that, that is perfectly fine as long as you attribute the source and then you put that in between quotation marks.
00:03:51
Speaker
But, you know, getting an entire chart or an entire map from somebody else and use it in your own news story is the equivalent of copying an entire news story, right? And just saying, well, this comes from the New York Times, and here is the story, right? Right. You cannot do that. No, you can't do that. And what's a little weird, I mean, there's a few things that's weird about it. One is you just shouldn't take other people's work and just present as your own. But like in this case, just as the example, right, they added
00:04:20
Speaker
the name, the Economist, on the image in this sort of grainy pixelated way at the bottom of the image, very small, and you couldn't click on it so that it would bring you to the original graphic, nor really ever would you because they put the entire thing there. It was really, really strange. I don't know why that happened. By the way, it was announced today that Vox.com has hired
00:04:45
Speaker
my friend Javier Saracena to do infographics for them. And Javier is a very experienced infographics designer from Spain. He has worked for places like El Correo and the Boston Globe, the LA Times, et cetera. So I think that he's going to bring a lot of great things to vox.com. And I think that he can help avoid these kinds of situations, right? Yeah, absolutely.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, because he has so much experience. So that was the good news today in relationship to that. But there is an additional thing that many people do. And I do believe that when I say many people, I said many people in the news industry, particularly not that much in the US perhaps, but certainly in other countries, which is to get someone else's graphic
00:05:41
Speaker
and then copying it somehow, right? Changing a color here or there, changing the font. But at the end, it's the same thing. It's the same data, the same reporting, the same underlying information. And you're just basically repurposing. It's like if a student copies something from Wikipedia and then changes just a few words or they order a couple of paragraphs or something like that.
00:06:10
Speaker
I mean, there's a lot of gray areas here, but I don't think that is acceptable either. And I have written about that. So let
Best Practices for Chart Remaking
00:06:18
Speaker
me ask you this. So let's say at news organization A, and I write an article about, I don't know, the unemployment rate. And I show a bar chart of unemployment rate over the last year or whatever it is. And I'm at news organization B, and I write sort of a similar article, maybe cover some other things. But I remake the same graph.
00:06:38
Speaker
That is a very interesting case because in that particular case, it's a graphic about, let's say, data that anybody can get. What I would say in that particular case is, don't copy the chart from the other organization, obviously, don't trace it. Go to the original source and download the data yourself and then recreate the chart.
00:07:07
Speaker
There are other cases in which, again, there's a lot of gray areas here. Let's suppose that instead of being another news organization, you get the chart from a source, you get the chart from a research paper or something like that, and you really, really, really want to show that particular bar graph in that research paper that the scientist herself or himself has sent you.
00:07:29
Speaker
In that case, I think that it is perfectly acceptable to trace the chart. Just because you are using the scientists as a source, you can ask for permission, obviously, and then you just trace the chart and that you don't need to get access to the actual data. You just trace the chart and that is perfectly fine.
00:07:44
Speaker
I think that the key is to use a little bit of common sense and a little bit of quick pro quo thinking, right? So you need to think of, if you would feel bad if somebody else did that with your own work, you should not do it yourself. Do unto others, man. Do unto others, right? Exactly.
Innovation and Credit in Graphic Design
00:08:06
Speaker
Do unto others. I think where this pops up and rears its ugly head is when you have these
00:08:15
Speaker
unique or different or innovative visualizations that come up. The one that we were talking about, The Economist, it was a different sort of take. It wasn't a line chart, sort of a vertical, sinky diagram sort of thing. And that was a little bit different. And I would guess that the sort of standard graphs are stolen a lot, but people don't get upset about it because, oh, it's just a bar chart. It's a standard bar chart. Yeah, when you have a more unique chart,
00:08:40
Speaker
yeah that is a clearer case i believe i mean you should certainly not copy somebody else's work although i would say so i mean again this is a discussion that would require hours and hours of conversation and you know focusing on these specific cases i would say that a graphic forms
00:09:01
Speaker
don't belong to anyone. So let's suppose for example that I come up with a new way of visualizing information, a new variation of the parallel coordinate chart or something and I create something super innovative and then I plot some sort of data onto that. So if somebody else wants to use that same graphic form,
00:09:22
Speaker
With a completely different data set and the graphic ends up looking similar to my graphic I cannot claim I cannot claim that that is plagiarism because it is not they are using a completely different data set It's the same graphic form it may look similar, but the data set is different. They are just taking you know a
00:09:39
Speaker
Using the graphic form that I created so graphic forms are like, you know, like technology innovations. I mean you cannot patent that No, that's right. But should they should they cite you or source you or say inspired by you? I mean do you I mean there's I mean we won't do that with like play fair like we wouldn't say play for Britain exactly but is there a time frame where that
00:10:01
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, if I were myself and the, for example, if I really, really wanted to use, you know, a particular very specific, very unique graphic form that somebody else has created, I may credit that person. So I would say, well, my data set is completely different, but, you know, this graphic form was inspired or was created by whomever, right? So I will do that.
00:10:24
Speaker
But I would not, I mean, if I were the creator of a graphic form myself and somebody else did something similar with a completely data set, I would not feel insulted if that person didn't credit me as the creator of the graphic form, right? So because once you put a graphic form out there in the outer world, I mean, it's just, it's out there. It's like, you know, I don't know, it's different for you claiming that he owns a bullet, bullet charts, right?
00:10:52
Speaker
I mean, he certainly created that kind of graphic form, and he should be credited for that, but not constantly, right? No, right. It wouldn't make sense to credit him constantly. Right. I mean, it seems part of it, if- Or Sparklines, right? Or Sparklines. Yeah, Sparklines is a great example, right? So it's in Excel, like Excel added in. Yeah. So what I guess is interesting about it is this sort of time span of do things sort of peter out
00:11:20
Speaker
and when you need to cite. And the other thing that's interesting is if data visualization itself as a field wants to be sort of more of a scientific, not a scientific method sort of thing, but there's obviously an academic branch to data visualization. There is a lot of discussion about these approaches and that approaches. If it's sort of going down this path, and maybe it's not, but it's going down this path of the field is evolving,
00:11:47
Speaker
then you're sort of in the same world as scientists or social scientists, where if you come up with an approach that's not your approach, that's the field, that becomes the field's approach and then it becomes adapted and changed and applied.
00:12:01
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's like, yeah, it belongs to the community. It doesn't belong just to you. It belongs to the community. In the first place, because your own work is based on the people who preceded you. We're all standing on the shoulder. It's just standing on the shoulders of everybody
Ethical Reproduction of Graphics
00:12:20
Speaker
else. We'll just have all these quotes. It is different, though, if somebody uses your very unique graphic form with exactly the same data set or a very similar data set.
00:12:31
Speaker
And they just need the color or the font. That's different. That is different. So when you pair the information and the way to represent the information, then you can certainly have a case of plagiarism, in my opinion. And we have seen some recently. So then I wonder about...
00:12:48
Speaker
what seems to be sort of Vox's approach, aside from this other thing that popped up, but they do these, they have their cards and they have their like, you know, 15 maps that explain something. Everything, yeah. 15 maps that explain the world. And they take these maps and they put them on the site and they're taken from all different sources and usually I think they source them. But what is, do they have a responsibility to be remaking these graphs or?
00:13:16
Speaker
No, no, no, they should publish them as they are. And I don't know. I mean, again, it's a very complex issue to discuss. There's a lot of gray areas. In that case, what I would recommend would be to first of all contact the authors just to get permission.
00:13:34
Speaker
Again, you are not using the map to teach lessons about how to do better visualization based on what you can extract from that map. In that case, it would be a property, in my opinion, to just publish it and praise it and say, this is great, and these are the things that we can learn. You are using that map in a news story to support a news story. In that case, it's like using somebody else's photographs without permission, right? You will never do that. You will need to ask for permission, right?
00:14:01
Speaker
So it's the same thing with charts and maps. If you're going to insert somebody else's work in your story, you should get permission. And if they ask to be paid for the rights to reproduce that, you will need to pay it or just drop the graphic. So yeah, again, I don't know what the policy is over there. I would not dare speak a lot about what's going on in companies like Vox.com. But myself, if I run a company myself or I wear a manor or something like that, the policy that I would recommend is
00:14:31
Speaker
always contact the author obviously and ask for permission. I could actually mention several websites in news websites in Spain whose practices are much more
00:14:50
Speaker
are shadier. I've seen some of these on your site. You mentioned some of these. In terms of stealing content from somebody else with no permission, we are just mentioning Vox just because Archie just mentioned it on Twitter. What about data visualization books, like books that don't source things accurately?
Professional Courtesy in Criticism
00:15:12
Speaker
but i don't think that this happens very often in visualization books just because i mean it's just a relatively small community so everybody knows everybody and i think that all authors who are writing about visualization tried to be as careful as possible at sourcing things and getting permission something say that which is the right thing to do right
00:15:31
Speaker
But we have a very famous case in which a very famous author didn't ask for permission to reproduce an image and then criticized the person who created that image harshly, very harshly, without even mentioning that person's name.
00:15:48
Speaker
So this was Edward Tufti in Envisioning Information. It's a very interesting case. In page number 34 of Envisioning Information, Tufti reproduces a chart titled, Diamonds Wear a Girl's Best Friend, in which you can show the variation of prices of diamonds. And the line chart is built on a leg of a woman and stuff.
00:16:14
Speaker
And he harshly criticizes that chart, saying that it's chart junk, it says unsavory exhibit, chock-a-block with cliche and a stereotype, coarse humor, whatever, whatever. So it's like he's using very harsh words to describe the chart. And it's certainly not a good chart, in my opinion. It's not a good chart, right?
00:16:34
Speaker
But if you want to criticize somebody else's work, you need to be elegant, right? And first of all, you need to get permissions to reproduce that chart. And as far as I know, he didn't do that. The chart was done by Nigel Holmes back in the 80s. And Nigel will always tell you that Tufti never got permission to reproduce this chart in the book.
00:16:57
Speaker
And second of all, even if you don't get permission from the author, at least name the author. Like the name of the author there, right? As if the person doesn't exist and this thing just sort of appeared. Yeah, the graphic came from nowhere and it was just out there and I just selected it to illustrate a trend or a pattern that I see out there and then I harshly criticized that person. I mean, that is not, I mean,
00:17:23
Speaker
I don't know how to describe it, but when I learned about this case, it really made me feel bad because I don't think that it's an elegant thing to do. And it's not a professional thing to do. So yeah, this is the most famous case that I know of.
Reflecting on Ethical Gray Areas
00:17:42
Speaker
Very interesting. Well, I'm glad that the first episode of this podcast was just a matter of gray area. Yeah, it always is, right? There's no black and white in the world. There's no black and white. It's all somewhere in the middle, right? Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, thanks for coming. So this is the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you all next week.