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Episode #141: Tapestry Roundup with Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
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On this week’s episode of the show, I chat with Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic from Storytelling with Data to talk about the recent Tapestry Conference held in Miami, FL. A day-and-a-half of great talks and great people, Tapestry is a small...
The post Episode #141: Tapestry Roundup with Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction & Conference Recap
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, I'm going to recap the recent tapestry conference that took place in Miami, Florida. And to help me do so, I'm very happy to have Cole Nussbauer-Naflick from Storytelling with Data on the show with
Support & Book Giveaway
00:00:28
Speaker
me. Before I get to the recording of our discussion, just a quick reminder.
00:00:33
Speaker
If you are interested in supporting the show, please consider being a Patreon supporter. You can help me cover costs of editing, recording equipment, transcription, and the web service fees. And also, if you're interested in winning a copy of Cole's book, Andy Kirk's book,
00:00:53
Speaker
a book by Tukey and a book by Naomi Robbins. I'm holding a little fun contest on the site. If you write a quick Amazon review of my book, Better Presentations, I'll enter you in a raffle to win one of the packs of books that I'll send to you at the end of the month. So you can check out the show notes and my blog for more information on that. So, on to the show.
Conference Energy & Interactions
00:01:21
Speaker
Okay, Tapestry, Miami. Did you have a good time? It was fantastic. It was, wasn't it? Yeah, I feel super energized, the chatter at the end of the day. You know it's been a good conference when it's over and people are still hanging out. They don't want to leave the room. Yeah, it was good. So Tapestry has always been like 100 people max or so.
00:01:41
Speaker
And we've been each been to a few of these and some of the previous ones have been. They kind of put them in these boutique hotels and the rooms kind of feel a little small and intimate cozy cozy which is nice but also this was sort of in a bigger room and I felt like.
00:01:59
Speaker
I think there was more interaction because of it. Yeah, I did too. Space afforded people to move around in a way that wasn't possible last year. Which is weird because you think like an intimate space and be more intimate, but I felt like with the big cavernous sort of auditorium that people did interact along.
00:02:13
Speaker
And it somehow made people more likely to switch chairs and sort of move around over the course of the day where people weren't just stuck in their one spot. Right. We don't need to go through every talk because no one is a person to that. When they can watch all the videos. They can watch all the videos. Yeah. So I'll put links to everything. So when the videos come out. But the program started
Mona Chalabi's Visualizations
00:02:33
Speaker
on Thursday. So they also added a half day, which they haven't done in the past. So the event started on Thursday at one with Mona Chalabi from The Guardian. Do you want to talk about her talk first? Yeah. I mean, you'll provide show links, I'm sure, for folks to be able to check out her work. But I think something that's unique about Mona is the hand-drawn style.
00:02:54
Speaker
And probably people are familiar with some of the stuff that she's done over the years. But I thought it was interesting because part of her talk was about, and we touched on uncertainty in a number of the talks, but that the hand-drawn aspect of it helps you convey some of this less precision in a way that can actually be useful because it takes people away from the numbers and gets them to focus on what they're looking at. Right. Do you think that's true? So I agree. So we saw uncertainty a lot in the last couple of days.
00:03:23
Speaker
Well, and in very different ways. Right. It is not uncertainty so much as precision. Yes. Right. Because in the hand drawn, because of the way the axis is around the side, and it might be, you know, you see the ups and downs, but you don't necessarily try to tie them to a specific number in the way that we do. Right. And she also doesn't, in Mona's case, she also didn't show any examples where she drew like a bar chart with a rectum.
00:03:49
Speaker
So she would use shapes or icons so that it's like a rounded edge at the end. So it's not exactly clear like, oh, that vertical line at the end of the rectangle is where the point is. When it doesn't make you in the same way act, I don't think, to want to follow your finger across and figure out where it is in the axis because you don't sort of have the right benchmark to be able to do that.
00:04:12
Speaker
I thought one of her interesting points early on was how you want to associate your audience with the topic, right? So that if they look at the graph or the picture, that they get a sense of what it's going to be about before they actually read any of it.
Critique of Superficial Visualizations
00:04:29
Speaker
Which is interesting. It made me think at the end of the day, because Elijah Meeks' talk, who we'll talk about a little bit, he made a point in that talk of sort of lamenting the
00:04:39
Speaker
I don't remember what he called it, but it's sort of like the drive-by chart that flies by on Twitter that's like, oh, I'm supposed to get it in a second. He kind of lamented that that's the thing. But that's kind of Mona's whole.
00:04:49
Speaker
I don't know if the goal is speed there though, which was I think what Elijah's beef was with is that we prioritize that or everything else too often, but more that the human connection piece, right? You see something and you're sort of intrigued and she showed some really
00:05:10
Speaker
Interesting let's say visuals right at one point. I'm just gonna say it we had gigantic drawn balls very big very big and it made sense in context I bet she does things that she's not afraid to push boundaries and rice. It's really interesting She mentioned a number of times how she's
00:05:26
Speaker
She's really interested in the body and bodily functions. And yeah, we saw charts with penises and a pie chart of rectal bleeding. And someone vomiting, I think there was a line chart or vomit or something. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing she also does really well is that she finds data that's sort of different and that, you know, she just minds like the CDC website and she's finding all this stuff that's public just there.
00:05:52
Speaker
And she's just finding it, which I think is probably characteristic of a good, certainly good journalist and also probably a good data visualizer, data analyst. Yeah. I thought it was interesting to get insight into her design process and how she comes at it from multiple different ways. Cause she talked about that, but then she also talked about the case where she'll have an idea for something
00:06:10
Speaker
but then need to go after data that will help her make real that idea, which is sort of a different way
Mona Chalabi's Design Process
00:06:16
Speaker
of thinking about it. She also talked about this, and I'm curious about, I'm sure you do this with the folks you work with. She also talked about this process that she has of when she'll make something and then she'll show it to friends. Yes, actually that was a fascinating, and I feel like people were taking a ton of notes during that piece of it because she said she has her, you know, six friends that are on a common thread or a text message and that she,
00:06:38
Speaker
always shows them things early on where she's sketched something up so she hasn't committed a ton of time. But to be able to get that gut reaction of like, either, yeah, this kind of makes sense, or no, it doesn't, or no, this is way too much. Yeah, this is way too much. I mean, so I think that's like, if I were to come back to work on Monday and someone would say, what is the one thing that we should keep in mind? That might be it for me is to say, look,
00:07:03
Speaker
Don't make your graph some isolation. Just because you, as the researcher, or analyst, wherever, make your graph, put it in the paper, and then the editor.
00:07:11
Speaker
you know, cleans it off or whatever. And then even the web team looks at it like, show it to other people to see if they get it. I think that's just a big step that people don't do, right? I'm sorry. I know I don't do that enough. Yeah. And it's one of those things I feel like when you say it, it sounds really obvious, right? But when you make the graph, you know what the graph says because you make the graph. And so there's such value. Yeah. I mean, it's a simple line chart. You know, if you
00:07:35
Speaker
You know, there's a line, so there's a spike somewhere and you've seen it many times and sort of become blind to it and then you show it to your person next door and they're like, why is this thing? Yeah. So anyway, I thought that was... I think that can also help point out, she mentioned a couple of times how she got it wrong, right? Yeah. Where it's misinterpretation of the data or, you know, there's some other issue and
00:07:59
Speaker
especially if it's in a field that's not something you're super familiar with that you have, it's really easy to misinterpret data and to have ways of being able to check that with other people. That's the double-edged sword of the work that she does, right? She finds this unique data set and then she visualizes it, but she might not be as familiar with it and there may not be the obvious person to call to say, can you help me with this throwing up after the night of being a debarred data?
Passion in Data Storytelling
00:08:28
Speaker
So Mona kicked things off and then what Tapestry has done the whole series is have these what they call short stories.
00:08:36
Speaker
15, 20 minute talks. And that's what we had for the next four speakers on Thursday. A return just scooped up from Emma talked about some research they were doing. Jason Forrest talked about some research he was doing on WME boys. And then Ken Field from Esri talked about cartography of election. That was the one for me that stood out for a couple of reasons. One being that map, I'm not
00:09:03
Speaker
cartographer by any means and like this challenge of mapping is such a big question in my mind of how we get people to understand.
00:09:12
Speaker
Because there's such value, right? Because the map is something that people are familiar with, but then it can be sort of misinterpreted or not used. And, you know, there's these distortions by the geography. You know, I think I had, like, glanced at his website once, but really looked at it. And he has this collection of election maps in one page of election maps in the U.S. and just seeing all of them put next to each other. And I just, I wonder about these cartograms, which we know
00:09:40
Speaker
are truer to the data in some way, but not as recognizable. That's the clear trail. And I thought you showed some interesting examples though where he starts with the thing that is recognizable, but then shifts it into...
00:09:53
Speaker
some of these other variants of that that are truer to the data, but where you still are able to connect it to some sense of what the geographical underpinnings are. Right. Just feel on maps that the tools drive a lot of the decisions that visualizers make because we don't have a cartography background. It's like, okay, so Tableau or Data Wrapper or whatever the tool you're using is like, that's the projection. Okay, that projection must be right. But it's one of those things that it might not be right, or it might not be the best projection. We're not really, maybe most of us aren't thinking about it.
00:10:23
Speaker
But I like to talk, I thought that was a breakdown. Did you have one in this group that you really liked? Yeah, so actually the one that we ended the day with, Johnny Walker, who is a senior data analyst, or excuse me, senior data artist at Tableau, presented a section on, or a presentation on the Cockapoo.
00:10:41
Speaker
which is this rare bird in New Zealand and it was interesting for me, not topically at all. I actually don't care at all about this bird. It's green and cute and fluffy and it's sad that the population has dwindled, a little empathetic, but outside of that, this is not going to be something that I'm listening to because I deeply care about this topic.
00:11:03
Speaker
But Johnny so clearly, deeply cares about this topic that the passion was contagious in a way that I was so engaged to him as a presenter. And so for me, it opened up this interesting idea of, you know, the data is one piece of it and being able to communicate well with data, you know, communicate uncertainty, all these things that we'll talk about or that people talked about at the conference. But there's this whole other piece that is the person who is presenting the data.
00:11:31
Speaker
which I think we can think about in a live setting like we saw here, but the way that you present also clearly when it comes to if you're sending something around and the things you put around it, the words you put around it. But I thought that was just a good reminder that if you can tap into your passion when you're presenting in a way that gets other people's attention, that can be a really useful thing for communicating more effectively. Absolutely. And it's tough I think for a lot of people because when you're talking about
00:12:00
Speaker
health care costs or revenue projections. It's hard to be enthusiastic about some of that stuff. And then that's where I think it's on the onus of us, of the people who are looking at the data or communicating data, figure out why is it interesting. If you can't figure that out, there's no way you're going to get your audience interested about it. And we saw examples.
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah. So Johnny did the last talk and then there was an hour of demos. Did you go to any of the demos? You know, I kind of, I popped around a little bit, but I didn't spend a ton of time on it. So I'll just say the one that I went to and I wanted to make sure I checked out was Matthew Bremmer who's from Microsoft. He and function Lee and one other person who's named I'm forgetting have this new tool called Charticulator. And I'm not quite sure how I feel about the name.
00:12:44
Speaker
But it's a tool in the browser where you sort of have combining illustration and data binding. And it was just interesting. I've only played with it a little bit online and there's some videos, but there's really, as it usually is, to talk to someone and watch someone who's created something.
00:13:04
Speaker
Show you first person how it works, which is you know, which is really it's not just cool to see it But it's like also great experience. It's a different experience and you like you see his enthusiasm for something he built so Okay, so that was day one day two we came back 9 a.m. Kicking off with Matthew Kay who's an assistant professor at University of Michigan talking about uncertainty
Visualizing Uncertainty in Data
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah. So Matt gave us a, what do you call it? A biased tour of the uncertainty visualizations, and a ton of great examples because I think he came back to this idea that's been, I feel like repeated a lot lately that is probably not quite right, which is that we don't have good ways of showing uncertainty because he countered that with, there actually are ways of showing uncertainty that can be intuitive for people. We just haven't been good at showing uncertainty that way historically.
00:13:58
Speaker
And so he talked about some specific and showed us specific examples of how you can do that and some of the ways that they found.
00:14:05
Speaker
to be able to show uncertainty in ways that people get it, right? And showed us some places where that doesn't happen, why that is. Specifically, we're looking at icon arrays, or he turned this continuous data into a quantile dot plot. Yeah, some sort of strip plot sort of thing. I thought it was interesting, this idea that people can, if it's small numbers or small multiples, if it's three or five
00:14:33
Speaker
that we know what that number is when we see three circles or five circles without having to count. Yeah. He had a term for that. Supatizing. Yeah. Supatizing. So I feel like I've seen Matt give a talk before we use that same word. So that's like, I'm going to get him a t-shirt that just says that, but yeah. The thing that popped to my mind as I was, as I was watching Matt's talk, which I really liked, was he talked about how we want to try to get our, the consumer of the visualization to understand uncertainty.
00:14:58
Speaker
And I also wonder whether we should be talking more about the producer of the graph. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who are making graphs with data and they're not thinking about the distribution or the percentiles or just the underlying uncertainty of the data that they're using.
00:15:15
Speaker
Maybe that's a bigger nut to crack. Yeah, I think so. And there were questions on that of what do I do when my manager asks me for a number or the person who I'm giving it to, they need a yes or a no of do we make this decision and how it's unfair in a lot of ways to try to boil it down to that or it's misleading potentially in big ways that are important.
00:15:38
Speaker
Yeah, it was a lot of good food for that. Yeah, it was. Absolutely, absolutely. So I want to take a pause before we move on to the next talks because something happened at the end of Matt's talk.
Presentation Endings Debate
00:15:47
Speaker
that struck me, and I know you've been thinking about it as well. So at the end of Matt's talk, he had this great slide that summarized the whole talk. It was like two phrases. It was great. And then he clicked over to the thank you slide. And he clicked on the thank you slide. And a bunch of us are saying, Matt, just go back one slide.
00:16:11
Speaker
And so I sort of made a snarky tweet that, you know, let's end on the summary slide, right? And so he and I were sort of talking later and he made a totally valid point, which is, well, you know, I feel as an academic, he felt obligated to thank his co-authors. And also if you have funders, like you might have to have your funders. My recommendation was, well, okay, so get to the thank you slide.
00:16:33
Speaker
and then go back to the previous one. That's what I find. I do that a lot or have started doing that, especially bigger presentations where you know you're going to go into some sort of Q&A after that where you give your ending, you do the thank you, you let there be the clear sort of end and then you flip to the next side. And then you have 15 minutes of that thing is sitting up there. But I also wanted to talk to you about the
Effective Presentation Styles
00:16:56
Speaker
some of the presentation things that you observe because we've been sort of chatting about this on and off and so like what were some of the highlights and lowlights of presentation styles that you saw? Yeah that's a great question and you know I talked about it a little bit with Johnny and so enthusiasm and passion is clearly one of the highlight things that I think that contributed to all of what I would consider the standout talks from what we saw.
00:17:19
Speaker
Something else that I think is a lot more nuanced is in how the person presenting honors the audience in terms of being aware of who the audience is, but also not making assumptions about them that might very well be wrong. I think counter to that or things that I saw that felt a little off-putting is
00:17:40
Speaker
You know, somebody introduced something as if it were new and the first time it had ever been seen before when it was a pretty popular data visualization that we've all probably seen many times. Especially this audience. Yeah. And so that felt like it wasn't honoring who the audience is. Right. Whereas Matt, actually I wrote it down because I thought it was...
00:17:58
Speaker
We did this brief interlude to teach us a bit about Bayesian statistics. He started off by saying, if you aren't familiar, I'm going to give you a quick tour. If you are, bear with me for a minute. That was such a nice thing. Like, hey, I get it. We've got a mixed audience with people who come in with different
00:18:16
Speaker
knowledge of statistics. I'm going to go through this for the benefit of those who don't know. If you already do, it's just going to take a second. You just chill out, go tweet something. He did variants of that a number of times. Others did as well, but I thought he did a particularly effective job with that. There were cases where he'd say something like, I don't have evidence for this, but I suspect he's very
00:18:40
Speaker
Careful in his word choices in being precise, right? Which I think comes from him being an academic doing research and that's sort of like probably part of his DNA. Yeah any things you saw that struck me is like Okay, this is there's a reason why I'm just not as
00:18:58
Speaker
Yeah, there definitely were moments where I was feeling less engaged. And I think the commonalities, self-deprecation, I don't understand why this is a thing that people do. And I see it more in women and I don't know why that is, but apologizing for things that there's no reason to apologize for. And so don't do that.
00:19:18
Speaker
Yeah, that was a big one for me. It's like, oh, I'm sorry, my, you know, the slide is washed out or, you know, oh, I just put this together, which I don't think happened here, but like, yeah, it's just like, it sets it up in this, it's a first impression is like this negative connotation. And I just sort of feel like you can't control the projector.
00:19:40
Speaker
The projector was a little washed out for everybody. You can't control it. So just power through, right? But that being said, I think the talks on the whole were all fantastic. So I don't want to add too much negativity here because I think they all work great. But I know we were both sitting there talking about an interest of both of us.
00:20:01
Speaker
Um, okay. So after Matt kicked off, we had another set of short stories won by Kristen Henry at data, blick on color, one by Bill Shander on using words
Power of Personal Stories
00:20:13
Speaker
and visuals. And he took the Minard graphic and he sort of pulled it apart, which was really neat. Uh, Nadia Popovich from the New York Times, where she talked about personalizing climate change. And then Alex blind from bug crowd, where he talked about, um, tax and linguistics and linguistics and data is all of what I thought were really interesting. Yeah. That's really nice.
00:20:31
Speaker
And then we had lunch and then we had an hour of, now it depends on how you say this, but there's Pecha Kucha or Pecha Kucha and there's one other pronunciation. Yeah, I'm not even gonna try it. So they're usually like a short talks. They're supposed to be I think
00:20:46
Speaker
Six minutes. Yeah, and some number of seconds per slide. Anyway, so I think that what ended up happening was the organizers just said... Let's do a bunch of short tries. Yeah, let's just do a bunch of short tries. And so they were all really good. I think the one I think we wanted to just mention was Amanda McCulloch's talk.
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah, so that was a standout one for me. Yours, though, I'll also mention because you and I have talked about this one before, but I thought it was so neat to see it in person, the idea of the circular story, the children's one that you talk us through, and then you do it with the...
00:21:20
Speaker
Do we give a nerd a number? Right. That was great. With this, yeah. With this. Amanda's was very personal and she told us about a situation where she'd done some genetic testing and the process of getting the medical results from that or the results from that back from her doctor and how being someone who she works even in the... Yeah, she does global health work, global public health and she and I were talking afterwards.
00:21:49
Speaker
She also has in mind, which I think is a tribute to her talk, not only her reaction to what she was seeing about herself, but also she's thinking about people that she works with in communities around the world. I know she does a lot of work, I think, in Nigeria or Lesotho or something like that.
00:22:10
Speaker
who don't have the data literacy or the math background that she has. And I think that was the point of if this feels this way for me and I do have this context, how is this going to feel to somebody who doesn't? And she talked about this interesting shift of going from being primarily the designer of the data to being the creator to the consumer and the way that that makes her think about now how we create data.
00:22:37
Speaker
Amazingly brave to share that and she did it in such an effective way. Yeah, and she did it She like made the slides last night. Yes, like she put it together and like at night before which is just just amazing And then finally we closed up with Elijah Meeks from Netflix who was making this argument about the third what he called the third wave of data visualizations or the first wave being
00:23:04
Speaker
And then the second wave being sort of like the period directly after Tufti's books and then the third wave being what we're experiencing now with the sort of convergence of the tools. The convergence of these tools that
00:23:18
Speaker
Yes, there's high charts and there's quadri-gram and there's data wrapper but that those tools will sit on a d3 framework and then you know, there's the power there's the power bi and tableau but they're all the I dashboarding tools and so these classes was a nice when I thought it was this interesting idea as well of the convergence not only of the tools or
00:23:36
Speaker
of the modes, I think we call them, but also convergence of the audiences in terms of their expectations of what people doing data visualization are providing. It's not a good food for thought. It was. I will say I was expecting more fireworks from Elijah. Given, you know, he has some great posts and he's trying to churn some things up and have these debates and I felt a little more
00:23:59
Speaker
warm and fuzzy. Well, and I think, I think actually he made a comment expressing similar sentiments that coming into this, he thought he was going to be like the downer and, uh, but that actually it felt, uh, after having seen all of the other sessions that there were these common themes that came up, uh, in ways that were actually exciting and sort of, I think, I think inspiring. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of, obviously a lot of great work going on. Yeah.
00:24:27
Speaker
And a lot of, I think, great work and talks that we saw. Yeah, and I think it's just a reminder of how important it is to step out of your work every now and again, irrespective of what that looks like, doesn't necessarily mean going to a conference. But if there is one where there are people behind inspiring, that can be one way to do it. But step outside of your work, talk to other people who
00:24:50
Speaker
have complementary sort of, because that's one interesting mix here is it's, everybody sort of touches data visualization in some way or another, but we all come at it from very different pieces, right? There's the journalism side or the academia or the practitioner.
Conversations Beyond Presentations
00:25:07
Speaker
And the sort of conversations that, and I think that's a big part of the conversations that you have outside of that. This for me is a very different conversation in coffee breaks, right? Where it's not the networking, where you work sort of conversations. It's like meaningful conversations about the world and which I think is really valuable. Yeah, I think for me personally, I came to this conference with a specific
00:25:34
Speaker
goal in mind for myself. So when I went to InfoPlus a few weeks ago in Germany, I saw my pals, right? I saw Andy Kirk and I saw Nadi Brammer and Martin Lambert. I hung out with them. And someone had made this like off-handed comment that like, oh, you know, you can get off the couch now and go meet some new people, right?
00:25:53
Speaker
And I've been thinking about that, and there's two sides to that. On the one hand, I don't get to see Andy that often, once or twice a year. But on the other hand, it is part of the conference experience to go meet people. And so when I came to Tapestry, I made a conscious effort to go meet
00:26:12
Speaker
One interesting thing is that you're going to raise a hand to the very beginning, more than half the people. This was their first time. Right. And so that was, that was for me, it was a conscious effort to try to engage in those conversations and like.
00:26:24
Speaker
No, I met the guy who does data visit Universal Studios. I met this woman doing data visualization in Connecticut. I mean, it was just, and it wasn't like, you know, deep conversations. No, but now you have this connection. Yeah. And it was just like interesting to hear because I think the other thing that I have read out of Elijah's writing in the past is sort of West Coast Silicon Valley perspective.
00:26:51
Speaker
And I definitely come, I'm sure I, the stuff that I say in right, comes at it from an economist researcher DC bubble perspective, right? And so it's nice to talk to someone from, you know, the Connecticut State Department of Health, like what are their challenges? Yeah, it helps us step outside of ourselves, I think, in ways that's helpful. Yeah. Well, it's great, it's great hanging out. Yeah, I know, right? For me, this was my conference of coming to see people, yeah.
00:27:20
Speaker
All right, cool. Thanks, Will. Thanks.
Closing Thoughts & Video Recommendations
00:27:27
Speaker
And thanks for tuning in, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that conversation between me and Cole about the recent tapestry conference. Please do check out all the videos that are now posted online from the conference so you can check those out, along with some other blog posts and some Twitter threads about some of the conversations that took place, especially Elijah Meeks' closing keynote. So take a look at the show notes page so you can learn more and check out all of those links. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.