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Episode #114: Andy Kirk at SocSciFoo
171 Plays7 years ago
I just returned from a 10-day data visualization trek from DC to New York to San Francisco to Los Angeles where I talk workshops, gave talks, and attended the Social Science Foo Camp at Facebook. SocSciFoo, as it’s called, is...
The post Episode #114: Andy Kirk at SocSciFoo appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to the PolicyViz Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I hope everyone's well. I'm in lovely Northern California sitting outside at Facebook in Northern California at the Social Science Fu Camp, which is a gathering of, I'd say an incredible group of folks that I'm going to talk about in a little bit. What I'm going to do is have a review of the first day of SoSaiFu as
What is an unconference?
00:00:35
Speaker
we're
00:00:35
Speaker
come to call it with my good friend Andy Kirk. Good evening, John. Andy, how are you? I'm good. Great day, what a brain demanding day, but inspirational thing. It's incredibly inspiring. Yeah. So how about this? Why don't you start by telling folks what this is? Yeah. And then we could talk about some of the people that are here and what we've seen in the first day and change. Sure.
00:00:57
Speaker
So this is effectively an invitation event and it's known commonly as an unconference. And the essence of this is that the invited members of the group, of the party are here to shape their own agenda. They're here to determine collectively what are interesting topics under this very, really broad term social science. And basically over the course of a day and a half, or Friday night was a beginning point, so let's say over the weekend,
00:01:27
Speaker
We are here to try and nudge forward different topics of understanding to start to make connections with people that you've never had the chance to make connections with and just collectively to learn and be inspired and maybe go back after this and make a change.
00:01:42
Speaker
I mean, an incredible group of people. So let's talk about how we actually set up the conference.
Kicking off with Passion: Attendee Introductions
00:01:47
Speaker
So, um, there's about 250 or so, I think 250 people. And the first night Friday night brought us all in the room. Yeah. And then everybody had to introduce themselves, which I thought was going to be painful, but it wasn't, it wasn't, it was the opposite. Yeah. And he's preserved. So the idea was when people kind of sign up officially, we all log sort of two or three things that we are.
00:02:10
Speaker
interested in speaking about at least what we are about. And it was a very clever way to get everyone to kind of go around the table and going around the table is the worst thing for any event meeting. Everyone died inside and you just kind of enjoy it. But this was one of the funny, you wouldn't think for 250 people it would be possible to pull it off. But the idea was that everybody quickly said three things that they are here to speak about, that they stand for, that they are interested in and then quickly pass the microphone to the next person.
00:02:40
Speaker
and zip-zig-zagging around the room, and you're right, you'd think that maybe after the first 100 people, you'd be like, I'm done. Okay, I'm just gonna go and get a drink, but you just got captivated by the words you'd never heard of. Yeah, and the range. I kind of thought like you would also, there'd be some repetition. There wasn't a lot of repetition. No, I mean, database. Right.
00:03:03
Speaker
eight times. Maybe. And then you had data ethics, machine learning and AI, but not all like people don't get up there and say machine learning.
00:03:13
Speaker
It would be like a specific thing that they were passionate about. The nicest niche of that. Okay, so there were a few gasps, I think, as we went around the room. So I think Daniel Kahneman. That was the most. Although you see the list of participants, there were some that were not listed
Notable Figures in Attendance
00:03:30
Speaker
who are present. There were some that you saw the names of that you think,
00:03:33
Speaker
Oh wow, that's sunny. That's funny. And there's also, you know, oh, John Swabish is here. He's a cool guy. We'll spend some time in the bar. Yeah. But yeah, so when people listed their three things...
00:03:48
Speaker
There were occasions when people forgot to say their name, and everyone goes, name. And people usually shouted, name, for the most notable people. And it happened to be Daniel Cannon. And he kind of muffled Daniel, and then everyone sort of picked up on Cannon and was like,
00:04:04
Speaker
Wait, was that, was that, was that, no comment? Yeah. So that was. It was a fun boy. Yeah. That was a, that was a good start. Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google is here and I was super excited to actually meet him in person. I've never gotten to meet him in person. Yeah. Fernando Viegas is here. Who we both of course know. Absolutely. She gave a great lightning talk today. Yeah. And I think another point to make about the membership is it's
00:04:29
Speaker
really broad in disciplines. There's a lot of academics. I think that's probably... Yeah, a lot of academics. Three quarters maybe. Yeah, I'd say. You've got a real wide age band. You have very senior people the right way through to, you know, young lively, not myself. No, not us. Well, we might be near the younger side of the truth. I'm in the valley. But then the idea from this intro is that you've all kind of
00:04:59
Speaker
You've logged in this room, you've logged things that struck you as a topic of resonance and that would be interesting. And what then happens is you've got this big grid on the wall that's a schedule of time slots and rooms across the two days.
Networking and Session Proposals
00:05:15
Speaker
And you are invited therefore to ship the agenda by either individually proposing a session topic or just forging these links that you've now heard from people who are similar in mindset to you and you're just going to
00:05:27
Speaker
within the last five minutes. You see the guy, like, okay, so you did a session this morning with... Brad. Brad talking about sports and sports vis, and you guys connected after that introduction. Because I said in my intro, vis, vis literacy and football. Right. And he went, oh, well, I'm sports. Right. So let's have a look at it. And then so you write up your session, you put your names on, you stick it up, and then you hope that people will come to you. Right.
00:05:56
Speaker
big, small, or medium room. So we started at 10, and so there was a 10 o'clock, an 11 o'clock session, a 12 o'clock session. Then there was a break for lunch, a two, a three, a four, 30, and a five. That's right. A lot of sessions. Now I don't think, I think we only sat together in one session, so we've seen a lot today between the two of us. So you want to talk about your session real quick? Yeah, so my opening session, as I said, that was sports. It was broadly sports science, sports data, sports vis, and
00:06:26
Speaker
We were just, I was talking about my work, in case I was working with Arsenal Football Club, but to try and show that work in the context of football, but to elevate the themes to be neutral, showing complexity, dealing with audiences that have got no knowledge about some of the statistical techniques that have been used versus those that do. People have to encounter things very quickly.
00:06:51
Speaker
those that have got much more time to pour over it deep. So I try to elevate it out of there but of course people in the room were there because they were interested in sports and you know this is something that you know seems to kind of connect with them and it's great you know we've got room for people and
00:07:06
Speaker
I don't know what will happen next, but just having those conversations made me smarter about the thing that I'm talking about. Yeah, we should give us listeners a sense of what we have here. So just looking at the list. So there was a session on network learning, linking social survey and metadata, causality design and inference.
00:07:26
Speaker
arts and data, data science ethics. I went to that session actually. That was a really interesting session on how do we think about ethics with data and how do we either enforce data ethics policy or a datacratic oath, someone called it. How do we define data ethics? So that was great. I went to one on fake news. Oh, okay, yeah. So what kind of extension that and that was about how you're going to classify
00:07:55
Speaker
the intent of fake news versus the consequence of fake news that was unintended, the difference between misinformation, disinformation, the issues of trust because fake news doesn't catch fire unless there's some sense of trust in what is false. So that was, I know, and again, I actually took quite a backseat in that room to observe a subject that's different than anything I usually talk about.
00:08:20
Speaker
And again, just the spark of conversations and the big brains. I mean, it's fascinating. The conference is put on by Sage Publishing, Facebook, and O'Reilly Media.
Sponsorship and Participation
00:08:29
Speaker
And so Tim O'Reilly helped kick it off. And one of his recommendations was you go to sessions that you are not expert in. And I tried to do that a little bit. I went to the first lightning talk. So they have three sessions this weekend of lightning talks. And it was people talking about AI, their research and machine learning.
00:08:47
Speaker
people talking about communication. Of course, it was a little painful because I had to watch slides and as you know, but I will say this, this is the best part of the lightning talks is we ended with about eight minutes to spare. And the host said, does anybody want to talk for five minutes? And someone said, well, I want to hear what Danny has to say. And so Daniel Kahneman gets up there.
00:09:06
Speaker
And he talks for five minutes like he had done it a million times before about a new project he's working on with an insurance company and adjusters who just like that. And it was fascinating because he talked about basically signal and noise and how a lot of people are in his in his mind I think are overly concerned with data bias.
00:09:27
Speaker
where really maybe it's the noise we should be focusing on. And it's not the noise, it's the noise. I think going on to that point, the meta benefit is really seeing how people operate. Seeing how people interact with each other. Seeing how people are able to position these sessions as they introduce them. Again, about
Reflections and Learning
00:09:45
Speaker
something that you've got to know. So there's just lots of different layers of this kind of onion that you're peeling away as a participant, really. And you hosted another session.
00:09:56
Speaker
Yeah, this was, you know, something we've talked about on this podcast before about Ditaviz literacy. We had a room for we had a standing room only for that. Oh, wow. And it's interesting, because I think this is another, another observation I made is that we actually kind of went meandering around a lot of different subjects around the the core topic. In a sense, I don't feel I've learned a lot about Ditaviz visualization literacy. I've just learned lots about the subject now people think differently. And again, it
00:10:26
Speaker
people go into these sessions and they're all contributing. There's no one sort of sat there as a passenger. Everyone is just ready to commit. I want to tell you this. And it's just fascinating because although it's social science and there's a big tech leaning towards it, it does seem like it
00:10:42
Speaker
reaches this broad spectrum of things. I went to a session on why do we need childhood? With anthropologists. And it was fascinating to talk about the human evolution, how we raise kids. The children does an imposed thing. Well, a variety of things that really span. Like we talked about social media and kids today, we talked about
00:11:09
Speaker
how different humans are from our primate ancestors. And that, you know, we raise our kids for a long time, whereas, you know, in most animals, kids are kind of on their own, right? We talked about neighborhoods and the relationship between a kid's school neighborhood versus their family versus the broader neighborhood. And it was... Well, here's the thing. So, if you're listening to this podcast now thinking, why would this people, presentation people, people like us, come to this and get something from that to take back to our world?
00:11:39
Speaker
And I would say that, again, that meta-perspective is people talking about taxonomies, people talking about classifying things, people talking about critical thinking. Yeah. Well, I think that's the key. It's the critical thinking. Observing different perspectives on a subject. It's kind of what you learn at uni, in a sense. That's kind of what uni causes are. Right, right, right. To be critically reasoning things. And I think that's, again, why sessions like that are available to attend. Yeah.
00:12:04
Speaker
It bends your brain in two ways. Yeah, and a totally different way to learn about something that maybe you haven't thought about. Yeah. But maybe the research approach or the perspective on that, you can take that and apply it to what we do or other fields. And I guess the subplot to all this is the breakouts, the meeting people over a coffee machine, walking past something that you've just seen the name
00:12:28
Speaker
I've been looking to meet with you. And they set it up so that, you know, the rule is, I think they called it like a two-legged conference. There's no shame or anything, you know, you don't look down on anybody or feel bad if you get up and leave a session. You go to a session for 15 minutes, you get what you need out of it and you want to go see something else, you can just go. But you're also moving. And that moving round, because the rooms are spread over a couple of buildings. You can't just be in a single hub.
00:12:57
Speaker
You can't just drop hang with your gang and not interact with it. Although we're sitting here alone out on the terrace. But for the most part, you are really encouraged to go up and meet new people. And I feel like that tone that they set up at the beginning, that you should just go up and say hi to someone and find out what they do and what they're interested in. For me, it's fantastic.
Themes in Social Science Discussion
00:13:21
Speaker
It is.
00:13:22
Speaker
Most of the people, myself included, were in the frame of mind yesterday. I think we're both probably on the extrovert side of that spectrum and they said, you know,
00:13:38
Speaker
You got to not just be extroverted. You got to be sort of extra extroverted. But it's been an amazing first day and a half or so. So why don't we stop here. And we'll pick it up tomorrow afternoon. I think we go from like nine to three or something like that tomorrow. And we'll talk about the last few sessions that we have. Sounds good. Awesome. Thanks, Andy.
00:14:07
Speaker
All right, day two and a half, really? Day three? Day three? Something. So Saifu, we're right at the end, right before the final keynote after lunch, hanging out in the parking lot of Facebook. It's pretty nice. It's not here. It's warm, sunny, and it's February. So that's a bonus time for us in the UK. All right, so we've had three sessions this morning, and you got to watch Liverpool.
00:14:35
Speaker
Yes, I'm not going to delve into the emotional roller coaster that I entailed this morning. So how did you start the day off here? Well actually I took a different tactic today. So yesterday for me was all about maximising the chance to speak to and see and speak with people from our world of day to day, this presentation stuff. Whereas today it felt more like a chance to
00:15:03
Speaker
maybe even if our chance to speak to other people and to be exposed to other people's thinking, other people's topics that have really still got very little to do with my, they've got everything to do with my life, you know, politics and social things, but my day to day professional life. So I kind of went along and took a backseat in a couple of sessions just to kind of almost just observe how people talk about these topics that are, you know, relentlessly complex.
00:15:32
Speaker
How do they talk about that? How do they structure arguments? How do they converse with other people? Just kind of almost watch it from a very meta perspective of how smart people discuss things. And it's just been really, even the two sessions have been really rewarding on that front. Well, let me talk about my three sessions I went to. Because you kicked off with a lightning talk.
00:15:55
Speaker
The talks were really, I mean, they were all really interesting. It's a lot of research and sort of early research things. But I did my talk on the graphic continuum project. And Daniel Kahneman was in the audience. So that was a little nerve wracking. But at the end, he went, aw. And I was like, yes, mic drop. So that was great. And then I did a session where I guess I took similar sort of approach that you took, but it was a little more random. I just went to a random room.
00:16:26
Speaker
And I ended up with Daniel Kahneman was in the room right and for Nana Villegas and Fraucca Last time I'm blanking on but a researcher at University of Maryland and And we had this long discussion about so just the four of you
00:16:49
Speaker
Just the four or five of us. Talking about when you do a survey, letting people opt in or opt out, or giving the survey person permission to use the data. When you go into iTunes, whatever, and you have the agree, disagree, and no one reads that form. There's maybe some ethical quandary with that.
00:17:11
Speaker
And that maybe you're taking people's data and they don't really fully understand. Because they just want to get on with it. They just want to get on with it. And they're not going to be able to understand it. Even if they read it, it's all legalese. Yeah. So they won't really understand it anyways. So we talked for an hour about where do you put those questions in the survey? Because that matters. What are you asking? Is there a way to take the legalese and maybe make it more visual? So if Amanda and I were talking about, you know, is there
00:17:37
Speaker
Are there some visualization ways that you can do it? So again, this is the thing that I'm coming to, a reflection of this session. It's decided that there's repeated and repeatable themes emerging, because of course you have to. It's a social science event. But you're getting actors, you're getting interactions, you're getting influencers, you're getting
00:17:58
Speaker
emotions, feelings, trying to influence people. I've been to lots of different topics, but the same kind of language comes bubbling to the surface. And so even though, again, we spoke about this in the first episode of this podcast, which was why are some of these sessions remotely relevant to our specific domain, in our world, now slash the world?
00:18:23
Speaker
we're all dealing with people on every site, we're dealing with data, we're dealing with ethics, we're dealing with questions of what's the right form to put something in front of somebody when they're rushed or when they have time and kind of deal with complexity. So again, I think that's one of the biggest conclusions I've made from this session, which is it's over my eyes to continue opening my eyes to social science as a thing. I think I probably thought it was just a
00:18:49
Speaker
You know, a cardigan wearing... Patches on the elbows. Everyone talks. Nothing gets solved, but it's not... It's because things can get solved in a perfect way. Right. It's complex. Yeah, there are definitely these overarching themes. I think for me, one of the big things that showed up now and again was, we're not now even consistently with storytelling and stories. And as you and I have talked about multiple times, that word is still a little amorphous. Well, I think in our world,
00:19:18
Speaker
We've heard it so much that we start to think, yes, that's not a story. But it is the language that people not in our world are seeking and talking about. So would there be anything you would change? About the session? Or about the last two days or about anything? I don't think I would actually. Because I'd start to see how else you could have done such an event.
00:19:42
Speaker
I mean, I think I would like to have more... I would probably want to remix the balance a little bit. Oh, right, in membership terms. Yeah, because it was, I'd say what, maybe three quarters?
Suggestions for Improvement
00:19:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I think some more practitioners, maybe. I also wonder if there's possibly too many people who know each other. Although, although you have... Or aware of. Right, you have this danger that the folks who are here are so good.
00:20:09
Speaker
and what they do, that they're bound to know other people who are also so very good at what they do. And so part of that is, you know, you're never really going to get around that. I would like to see probably some more geographic diversity. It felt very like
00:20:23
Speaker
Northern California, Chicago, New York, DC. Northern Europe. Northern Europe, yeah. I think there was one member from Australia. Yeah, and there's one person from Texas, but I don't think anywhere else in the southern United States. Yeah. Again, that's hard. I think those are all minor quibbles. I really like the Unconference.
00:20:45
Speaker
I do now. Now, we haven't gone to the final hour wrap up. And so I don't know if they try to tie things together. But I do like this. You build the conference and you go have smart, interesting conversation. Yeah. And I think another thing, another byproduct of what's happened is the weekend's gone along and people have started to form acquaintances. You've had these impromptu breakouts. So even the agenda, which itself was kind of
00:21:15
Speaker
structured by people and quite fluid has then got even more fluid and random as people said, ah, you must meet so and so. So it's not in a room, it's not booked in, you're just taken out. And again, that's only possible because we've got such a wonderful setting where you've got multiple rooms, you've got
00:21:34
Speaker
um, lobby areas, you've got outside areas, the sun's shining. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So that helps. You're confined to a single rectangle. Right. Right. There's a lot, there's a lot of general space. And I think also that they set the tone when they launched this thing that said, you know, be your extra extrovert. And so I probably said this on the, on what we were talking last night, you know, I, you know, I went up and just people are talking. I just sort of went up and said, can I, can I just chat with you guys? And I probably won't do that at a lot of other conferences because it's not the same. It doesn't have that same tone.
00:22:04
Speaker
This has a much more open feel and tone. And I think also part of that is you're building the conference agenda. And so that's, that itself is very open. And there's two sides to that. It needs you to be that. Right. But it needs them to be, who's this odd guy? Right. Right. Yeah. And he's going to be, oh, sure. Yeah. Come on. Yeah. Stay with us. Yeah. It's kind of a mutual agreement that that's kind of the gist of the spirit of the session. Right. Right. Great. Great. So, uh,
00:22:31
Speaker
I look forward to the next weekend. I know, right? I might do it next weekend. All right, Andy. Always good to see you. You too, John. All right. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. I'll put a bunch of links up and pictures maybe to the website. So be sure to tune in and check out next week's episode.
00:22:46
Speaker
Uh, another interview from here in Northern California about, uh, data ethics, uh, with a couple of people that I befriended here. And, uh, so stay tuned for that one. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.