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Episode #176: Manuel Lima
219 Plays5 years ago
Manuel Lima is the author of three books and a leading voice on information visualization. He has worked with an array of organizations designing digital experiences and leading product teams. On this week’s episode of the podcast, I’m reposting a...
The post Episode #176: Manuel Lima appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I hope you and your family and your friends are all healthy and safe and well in these strange days.
Reposting a Discussion with Manuel Lima
00:00:21
Speaker
On this week's episode of the podcast, I'm going to once again repost one of the recent Data at Urban Digital discussions, this time the one that I had with Manuel Lima.
Introducing Manuel Lima and His Works
00:00:30
Speaker
Manuel, as you may know, is the author of Book of Circles, The Book of Trees,
00:00:34
Speaker
the book and website visual complexity. He is a creator. He is a speaker. He's an author. And we had a really good time chatting with one another and taking questions from people who attended that live video chat. So I'm not going to talk about anything else. And I'm just going to get right to the episode. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode of the policy of his podcast with Manuel Lima.
Discussion Setup and Interaction
00:01:00
Speaker
Hi, everybody. I'm John Twavish from Urban Institute. Thanks for coming in to this digital discussion chat. Good to see everybody. And I see a bunch of people who've been here for the last few days, which is great to see people coming back. So yeah, love it.
00:01:17
Speaker
So I'll just set up the parameters of the chat.
Exploring the Production of Lima's Books
00:01:21
Speaker
So as you can see on your screen, Manuel Lima is here to talk to us about all of his awesome work. So this is going to be great. If you have questions, just put them in the chat window, and I'll try to make a bit of a queue. And then you can just unmute yourself when it's your turn. And you can ask Manuel your questions. There's no need for me to have to read them unless you don't want to unmute yourself. That's totally fine too. And that's it. It's pretty low key.
00:01:46
Speaker
There's not a lot of polish to this. So just a chance for all of us to connect and have some conversation maybe with some adults for an hour and let the kids go have some screen time or whatever. So yeah. All right. Manuel, how you doing buddy? I'm doing great. Thanks everyone for joining and thanks John for hosting me. This is a great initiative for sure.
00:02:09
Speaker
Well, I'm glad you could come on. So I'm gonna show, you have other books. So this is the newest one, right? Is that right? No, it's the second. The newest is the circles actually. There's the circles. Okay, so here's trees. So here's the book of trees and here's the book of circles. So we can talk about circles and maybe pie charts and we can argue about that. These are both beautiful books.
00:02:34
Speaker
So I thought maybe we would start, you could just start by telling people about yourself. Again, it's whatever. But I mean, what I, as we were talking about before we kind of started, what I love about both of these books is they feel, especially the physical version, it's super tactile. It has a great feel to it, the print, the color. So maybe, I don't know if you want to talk about the process of creating these books and your process, because it's all historical.
Historical Visual Structures and Their Influence
00:03:02
Speaker
So what is your process like to go through and
00:03:04
Speaker
you know, research all this material. And then maybe we can just, after that, we can segue into what you're doing now and then people can sort of post their questions. We just take it like that. That sounds great. Great. Yeah, so go ahead. Why don't you go ahead. Yeah, so you mentioned the quality of the books, right? That's something that I also feel very proud of achieving in many ways with these books. And I think really the credit goes to Princeton Architecture Press, the publisher,
00:03:34
Speaker
they really invest a lot of time in making the, you know, great books, high quality paper, you know, high quality printing colors, they really strive to do high quality work. When I think it's really at a time where we have a lot of really cheap books that are just really low quality, and I hate to actually consume those books, I would rather have a PDF. In those cases, I think it hurts everyone, right? It's not a great experience. It kills more more trees along the way. And it's just a
00:04:04
Speaker
I really like, yeah, suboptimal experience for sure. So huge proponent of like high quality books. I think it's actually one of the types of books actually going up in terms of numbers. Because people that care about books care about high quality, right? So yeah, people that are new to my work, I would say maybe read my books in reverse order, which is starting with the latest.
00:04:32
Speaker
And then navigating all the way to my first, which is visual complexity. And I say this because when I started visual complexity, and this visual complexity for those who haven't seen the book, it's really all about network visualization, right? And it tries to understand this new sort of phenomenon of obsession for networks and visualizing really complex intricate structures.
00:04:58
Speaker
So as I was doing the book, even the first chapter of that book is called The Tree of Life. And that was me trying to go back in time to understand the origin, the genesis of interests from humans to visualize these intricate structures, which took me back to the tree diagram. And then I knew when I was actually doing visual complexity that the tree diagram, as I was uncovering all these illustrations, all these medieval work and so on,
00:05:28
Speaker
I realized that this was too good to be just a single chapter. So at some point, making a whole book dedicated to the tree diagram had to happen. I knew it. In my mind, it had to happen. So that was my second book, The Book of Trees, which really covers almost 800 years of human exploration of mapping hierarchies in the shape of a tree. And there's multiple cases there, multiple types and typologies.
00:05:57
Speaker
For for tree diagrams. And then I think following the same sort of mental exercise. I'm a little bit of obsessed about the origin of things. I wanted to go even further back. Right. Yeah, I wanted to go even further back. That's a great site almost slides right back right to like who would actually the first time that humans were thinking about visualizing information, right.
00:06:20
Speaker
And it took me to circles, like some of the most primitive. It took me actually back roughly 40,000 years back in time to the first petagriffs, you know, rock carvings that people were making really around the world.
Preservation of Modern Digital Information
00:06:34
Speaker
And many of them were circular in nature. Some of the most ancient archetypes of data visualization is the spiral, the concentric rings, and the section circle, which is the reason for why pie charts could possibly be so popular still today.
00:06:51
Speaker
So that was fascinating to me. And as I was discovering a lot of these old material, I became more interested in the old material than the new, I have to say. And I think part of that is, well, twofold. One is that we are very present oriented. We might think that we are in the pinnacle of civilization and everything we're doing, data visualization related or else, or in a different subject is very new.
00:07:18
Speaker
and it has never been done before, right? So I think I was trying to dismystify that sort of take that everything we are doing is ready, which is, it wasn't. I've discovered so many cases where what we're doing today is still just variants of what has been done in the past. So that was one thing. I was really becoming, you know, falling in love with a lot of this old material.
00:07:40
Speaker
And then the other reason for me to do some of these books was also to preserve some of the stuff that we were doing, even still today. And one of the concepts that was frightening to me, and I discovered this 10 years ago when I was working on the visual complexity book, is that notion of the digital park ages, which is this idea that
00:08:02
Speaker
you know many you know maybe a generation or two from now we're going to be able to look back at the current time and not being able to see read or decode a lot of the artifacts the cultural artifacts we're producing and that for me is a super scary outcome right I mean it's almost like again like this is a very and it's not even hard to imagine it's already happening like we already there's this article on I think BBC the other day
00:08:29
Speaker
on researchers trying to understand the work of a physicist, a UK physicist, right?
00:08:34
Speaker
and having to go back into old drives that he had and they couldn't, they don't have the technology to read that stuff done in the 80s, right? And this is just like 30 years ago or something. So it's really frightening. So imagine like the same process of all the amazing stuff we're creating today, not being able to be read or just consumed by future generations. That's a really scary thought for me. So if anything, some of these books,
00:09:00
Speaker
especially one of the modern examples are also way to preserve them for for posterity right for that for those future generations in some ways. Can I ask
00:09:10
Speaker
For people who are, so I would guess there's a few different types of people who read your books. There's people who are just fascinated with historical data visualization and how it has changed and evolved over time. There's people who are just interested in history in general, people who are interested in design and the origins of design. And there's probably another camp of people who are data visualization practitioners.
00:09:38
Speaker
working in the modern tools. And I wonder what you would say to someone like that who, you know, they don't really have a necessarily an interest in the origins of designer database.
Learning from Historical Visualizations
00:09:50
Speaker
What would you say to someone who is a practitioner says, how could I use this book in my current work?
00:09:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And yes, to your point, I think that's what appeals to me is that I, you know, since I can remember, I always hated to be part of one single label or being in one single box, right? I like multiculturality. I like, you know, just very sort of expensive ways of thinking and visual complexity from the beginning has been that I've always been fascinated by
00:10:22
Speaker
the amount of people and different backgrounds of people reaching out to me from, you know, architects to biologists to artists to I mean, the full gamut of almost roles. And I think the books touch that, you know, even some of the media covering the books. Yeah, it's not just about data visualization. It's it's tech media. It's it's art. It's design. It's it's science. You know, I had like nature and science talking about the book. So it's a book that really touches a full gamut of professions, which and I think that's actually part of the goal really.
00:10:51
Speaker
because I think that's the true nature of some of the stuff that is portraying the book. It has that sort of broad appeal and I really like that aspect of it. Now through the data visualization community specifically, you can learn a few things like one of course you can be inspired by both you know modern and ancient things.
00:11:12
Speaker
sometimes even more inspired by the, the stuff they did in the old days, because a lot of that stuff was done, you know, by hand, right. And it's incredible. I always give this example of, of the Volvo, this like medieval technique that they had, you know, that expanded about hundreds of years ago. And it was basically discs of paper that it could spin independently. And this was really similar to analog computers. They were actually able to create millions of combinations.
00:11:41
Speaker
using a very very simple process of just paper discs with end annotations. You know fantastic stuff the kind of thing that really it really portrays human ingenuity in a whole different way I feel especially those those old ones. So I think for visualization people I think being inspired by again both modern and ancient examples but then also understanding the logic behind some of these things right so
Research and Creation Process of Lima's Books
00:12:06
Speaker
One of the things I think I talk in visual complexity is the notion of ours memoritiva which happens in the I middle ages. And this was when people were being literally inundated by new information. There's, there's a great book called too much to know. And it basically it's an entire book.
00:12:24
Speaker
telling portraits or stories of people in that moment in time. This is roughly 700 years ago or 600 years ago, being inundated by new data. There was a huge growth of production. There was all this information coming from the ancient world, ancient Rome and ancient Greece. And people had to make sense of it all. This was like they were facing big data as we know today, just in a different time. And graphic depiction, visual data visualization was a huge factor in it.
00:12:52
Speaker
And ours in Moritiva was an attempt to decode the main principles for portraying information in a graphical way that would allow the user to actually memorize at a later stage. So this is really the genesis of information design. So a lot of the principles we still use today were actually created in medieval times. So for any kind of school or person that's interested in data visualization principles, I'm definitely obsessed with principles. I think it's a great way of
00:13:18
Speaker
of looking at a practice, it's through the main guidelines that it has. I think it's great to look back and see what, again, the genesis, what drove those principles in the first place, how they have evolved over time, and now, to a certain degree, many of them are still used today.
00:13:35
Speaker
Right. Do you I want to ask one more question about the books and then you can talk about what you're doing now. Do you have a you've mentioned already a few like these historical examples. Do you have a favorite from either the trees of the circles book. Do you have a, do you have a favorite like mini I have it here. I think, well, it's so hard to get one favorite, but one of my favorites. It's super hard to have one, you know, it's I think
00:13:59
Speaker
it's like when you do a book like this you kind of you know you really fell in love with so many examples and yeah and even yesterday i was like talking to my daughter chloe and of course one of the one of the positive things about everything that's going on in the world right now is that you get to spend well positive and negative at times yeah yeah but it's definitely spending more time with the kids and then talking to them in a way that you you didn't have the time before right
00:14:26
Speaker
So I was showing her a lot of these old tree diagrams. And she's very much into drawing and all that. So this is actually one of my favorite examples. It's actually a double page. It's a full spread of the book of trees. It's an example of an horizontal tree.
00:14:42
Speaker
What I love about this is that if you notice, this is a tree of morality, which is actually a very famous theme in medieval Europe. It basically portrays the tree of virtues and the tree of vices. And notice how the designer in this case
00:14:59
Speaker
creates a lot of visual metaphors to indicate what's good on this side. Notice how the tree is much more rich. There's color everywhere. The leaves are all fully green. There's fruits coming out. And this is the tree of vices, what you should not do. And notice how
00:15:19
Speaker
Some of the branches are actually kind of dying, losing color. And they play with all these visual metaphors to explain some really complex concepts back then. And again, these are things that were all done by hand. And again, just the amount of creativity that went into some of these things is remarkable. Yeah, that's great.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah, you were also mentioning the process. I think the process for this, I feel like I've completed my trilogy of books at this time. And I think it's kind of like the worst type of books you can do in a way because not only do you have to write a substantial amount and you have to do research on writing the right things and telling it in the right way.
00:16:02
Speaker
So there's a lot of writing and research that, but then the worst part arguably is actually getting the images themselves. And that's really usually time consuming process of going after the authors. You know, sometimes the authors don't no longer exist.
00:16:16
Speaker
you know even modern examples are equally if not even as hard to get because again the digital dark ages a lot of these things done in the early 2000s are lost literally lost like they lost the the code they the plugin doesn't work anymore they are unable to like reproduce it sometimes it's actually harder to get a modern example than a medieval one created 500 years ago right yeah then there's that and then it's just like the the whole process of
00:16:44
Speaker
of actually writing, putting the research, making the images, the layout for the book, getting, I remember getting, this is 10 years ago, visual complexity, getting the first manuscript back from the publisher with rather annotations all over the manuscript. I think I almost cried that moment. I was like, I was naive to the point of thinking that, you know, when you end off the manuscript to the publisher,
00:17:08
Speaker
It's pretty much done. It's like, hey, my job is done, I washed my hands, I can relax, get the beach somewhere. And that was just the beginning of the process, right?
00:17:18
Speaker
And then all those phases just, I mean, of course now I know about the process. I don't get as scared or depressed as I did. But it is quite the time consuming process for sure. Well, the other thing about these books, and again, I would maybe harder for the earlier ones, is that the quality of the images are all very, they're all high resolution images.
00:17:42
Speaker
yeah so which which is i don't know is it harder to get those the older is it easier or harder to get the older ones in a high res image and then the stuff it's actually easier i mean to be surrounding again to be honest like there's a lot of materials still today that's probably hidden in dusty cabinets somewhere in museums galleries as well so we only know what we know right and and and but fortunately things are changing and a lot of these institutions are actually
00:18:09
Speaker
Making a lot of their collections available online for people like myself. I can be in a in a cafe in Brooklyn and consuming these old medieval manuscripts. I don't actually have this is also something that I say for, I think, you know, 20 years ago, it would take
00:18:23
Speaker
a lot longer to do any of the books that i've done right in terms of like especially historical ones because i would actually have to go physically yeah to a lot of these museums in europe and elsewhere in the u.s and actually brosford i i didn't even know i would all along it would take to do the book of circles for example if i'd if i wanted to do it like 30 years ago
00:18:42
Speaker
So it's making it a lot easier. And yes, a lot of these examples are in IRAS. Now, it's surprising, like, let's say that I want to make an example, and this happened in visual complexity a lot, an early example of a natural visualization done in 1996.
00:18:57
Speaker
The resolution of those images were so bad back then, right? In 96, you were talking about 400 pixels by 400 pixels or something like that. So you couldn't do that in a book. You couldn't reproduce it. And then, again, a lot of the code was done. The author was like, hey, I would love to help you, but I don't think I can. There's no way. Or it just would take so much time for them to do it that it's just not worth it. So I ended up not including a lot of these examples, modern examples, because of that for that reason.
00:19:27
Speaker
The only impediment for all the ones sometimes is the money because a lot of these institutions ask for a considerable amount. And I don't have that amount to pay for every single image. I had to pick and choose. I had to pick and choose a few ones that actually ended up paying a good amount. So you have to pick and choose. I think, you know, the Library of France, for example, the National Library of France has amazing, beautiful illustrations, but they tend to charge considerable amounts. I picked a few, but not many.
00:19:56
Speaker
Yeah, I'm finishing another book right now, and it's like the Washington Post and the New York Times like they want, you know, a lot of money. So, oh yeah, and I won't say how much but it's a lot of money. So then, then you talk to, you know, more local newspapers like I have a few from the Texas Tribune who they do great work and
00:20:15
Speaker
and they're more willing to negotiate you know to say you know they want this amount it's like well i have to pay for this out of pocket would you be willing to do this and so i you know it's great when they negotiate but when you get to the big organizations they have a whole company that does it for them so um you're totally right and then i think people also don't understand like and i got requests like this like hey
Balancing Career and Passion in Data Visualization
00:20:37
Speaker
why didn't you make this illustration like larger and then the price is also an outcome of that right it matters like the size matters where it's gonna go it all has a price so if you want like a full page like especially in the cover you would have to pay a lot of money yeah so yeah it matters yeah it matters tremendously for sure
00:20:57
Speaker
You want to talk a little bit about what you're working on now and then I'll just remind people if they have questions just put them in the chat box in the chat window and then you can ask directly but maybe talk about a little bit what you're working on now and then.
00:21:09
Speaker
We'll see if for sure. Absolutely. For sure. So, right. So I've been at Google now for, I think for an half years. And what's been interesting for me at Google is that I think finally I was able to match or marry the two sort of separate lives that I had up to now. So all the research that you saw, the books that we just talked about and, you know, talks and teaching on data visualization,
00:21:34
Speaker
This has already been done on the side, right? It hasn't really paid the bills Substantially, which is another sort of thing that people that want to venture into this world of publishing should know He doesn't pay that well If you dig it for the money, you're not you're not gonna go far. Yeah. Yeah, fool it yourself. Yeah So but apart from that, so yeah, so I had to pay the bills right and especially not with two kids so
00:21:58
Speaker
Over the last 15 years, I feel like I've led two parallel lives. On 9 to 5, I was working for
00:22:06
Speaker
as a UX designer, UX lead manager in places like Microsoft and startups and IKEA back in the day and now Google. And of course, on the side, I was doing all of that, researching, teaching, all that stuff on data visualization. But interestingly enough, I think now at Google, I was able to marry the two things. And now I'm leading a team of a data visualization team building a library, a component library of charts for all of Google.
00:22:33
Speaker
really focused on cloud, but also we have internal clients across the company, which is really fun. And I think that's also the kind of way that I like to approach data visualization is being as horizontal as sort of again and pluralistic as possible, multidisciplinary, right? So we are, so my team is really a lot of roles from designers to UX engineers, to researchers,
00:22:57
Speaker
And we are also focusing on some more sophisticated types of visualization components, you know, things like the network topology or flow diagrams or complexity, you know, timelines of that nature, not your typical bar chart or line chart. Yeah. And there's a growing appetite for that, both internally, right, across different tools that we have at the company, but even externally as well, especially on clouds. And some of the cloud products are already importing and using and adopting our components.
00:23:27
Speaker
So that's kind of like what I've been doing and again it feels good because I think for the first time I'm able to again combine and unify these two passions that I had.
Future Projects and Webinars
00:23:37
Speaker
And then on the side I'm also thinking about a fourth book. This is not going to be the book of triangles though.
00:23:45
Speaker
I got that. I got that a lot of friends and my wife like, what is the next book? The Triangles book? Yeah. That's great. Wise guy. Yeah, real funny. Exactly. The Book of Squares. That would be quite the book.
00:23:58
Speaker
No, I think I ended this trilogy of books of that nature. So I'm thinking about doing another one, and that's going to be probably an announcement of that sort. It's more geared towards a design community this time around, and it's not going to be as visual, but I think it's going to be exciting. I'm definitely excited about that book specifically. And then I'm also interested, especially at the time where we are now, in kind of doing something like you are doing, John, I think
00:24:22
Speaker
People being kind of you know at home in these really tough times. I think if anything else it's a great opportunity for us to invest in ourselves but then expand our mind a little bit talk to other people and Educate ourselves and expand our mind in other ways, right? So I just started a series of free webinars I'm using crowdcast which is really a cool platform. I've been doing a lot of research on What's the right webinar tools to use and whatnot?
00:24:50
Speaker
I give, I tried a couple of others, but I think Crowdcast is a really cool one because you can follow people there. It's kind of like it does this social dynamics into the into Crowdcast. So I'm thinking about that. And I announced this last week about the same time that you announced this talk. I announced the three webinars and you know, these are three webinars.
00:25:10
Speaker
It's going to be called the evolution of database, the language of database, and the principles of database. And all three webinars, 100 people each filled up in like two hours. Wow. Which is to say, I thank you. I was really kind of blown away by the demand and interest. And I think there's really a lot of appetite for the subject. And also, of course, as a result of a lot of people being at home right now.
00:25:38
Speaker
But I'm really excited about that. I think, you know, looking back, doing some introspection on the things that excite me and you're going to do that anytime 40. I think there's a little bit, a little bit of a middle middle-aged crisis going on. I was like, Hey, what do I want to do with the rest of my life? And for me, for me, it's really about,
00:25:59
Speaker
communicating my knowledge and inspiring other people. And the books are a reflection of that passion that I have for knowledge. So I think doing that through webinars is really fun. What are you doing right now? And I like webinars more than just being a static viewer that you do online because we have interaction. Hopefully we're going to start that in two minutes or so. You can actually have people asking questions and interacting with others.
00:26:27
Speaker
And I think it's still not quite the same as a physical type of experience or a seminar or talk, but it's almost the same, right? At least there's no interactivity between. And the fact that anyone can join across the world is, for me, super empowering as well. You know, if you were to do this in, let's say, New York, tomorrow, you would be
00:26:47
Speaker
really conditioning people by the money that they would need to spend, you know, to travel to New York, to stay in hotel, to go to this conference. And not a lot of people can afford, but doing this, now you have people all around the world, you know, the webinars, I was looking at the data, I have people from all the way from India, China, different regions of Asia, Europe, US, it's really like the pluralistic effort. And I love that. I really do love that. Yeah.
00:27:13
Speaker
Well, it also, and I mean, not for these, but for other webinars where you do them for an organization, the advantage is, you know, maybe only they can only have 20 or whatever number of people attend the webinar at that time. And if you say, well, just record them, then they have their own library where they can, you know, other people in the organization can go back and, you know, hopefully learn from it. It's different because you're more like watching a video as opposed to having an interaction.
00:27:37
Speaker
um but it's it is i think it's it's certainly a challenge and we've been we've been having conversations like these for some of these discussions with with people you know last couple weeks um there's obviously a different sort of like technologies that you need with microphones and headphones and all that but it's and i think we all know like it's really easy to put that video the webinar window like minimize and check your email so i think it's there's um
00:28:05
Speaker
There's maybe a strategy, a different kind of strategy when you're teaching in a webinar than when you're live in front of an audience. Well, we can keep talking, but let me just pause and see if anyone has any questions because this is intended to be a discussion.
Google's Visualization Components Library
00:28:24
Speaker
So there are no questions in the window now, but does anyone have any questions for Manuel on the books, current work?
00:28:34
Speaker
you know, how he's faring in Brooklyn with two kids. Either folks are sleeping or they're too shy right now. So we can just keep talking. So I'm curious about the Google work. I don't know how much you can talk about it. So, you know, whatever you're allowed to talk about. So you're building, is it building a library of graphic types for people at Google to,
00:29:02
Speaker
use as a reference library? Is that essentially what, or not essentially, but is that the gospel? It's kind of twofold, right? I mean, one is that we have created what we call internally the SPAC, which is basically a set of specifications or guidelines on all to use charts. And that has been widely sort of used internally as, again, as a list of guidelines or best practices on all to use charts, covering many types of charts and applications.
00:29:33
Speaker
And then, of course, the other thing we're doing is we are creating a component library like a UI component library that people can just plug and play our components into their own products and You got that. And of course, the plugin plays isn't quite app and that in that way. There's always a lot of and holding and customization that's needed.
00:29:52
Speaker
And actually, one of the toughest challenges for us to understand is whether we draw the line between doing a general library for different teams and knowing when we can actually spend a lot of time customizing them for the specific needs of an internal client or partner team.
00:30:16
Speaker
But then a lot of these charts will be visible in internal products that never see the light of day by anyone externally, but also some of them will be in many cloud products, for example, that will eventually be seen by enterprises and companies and users elsewhere outside of the company. Yeah, really interesting. There was a quick question for you that the webinar, I put the Crowdcast webinar link in the chat box and it looks like it's full. And so Bridget wants to know what,
00:30:46
Speaker
Going to be more in the future recording them, you know. Yeah, there will be more in the future. Again, like I was, I was, Richard. I was, I was surprised by by dangerous. I think I put it
00:30:59
Speaker
on Twitter. And again, it took me two hours to just the whole thing to be filled. And these are 100 people each per webinar. So it was more than I was expecting. I have kind of like a 100, 120 people limit. And this is more like a technical limit. I kind of realized that after 100 and something people, the connection doesn't work so well. And you start having issues.
00:31:23
Speaker
And it also as I have issues with the plan that I have. So I would have to pay a lot more for the stability that comes with adding more than 100 people. So I'm definitely planning on adding on doing more of those. Again, I was not expecting this type of demand.
00:31:38
Speaker
And I think people, which is great, it's great to know that people are both interested in this topic and probably like, as they are today, locked at home, they are even more eager to do something that takes them away from home. So I'm definitely planning on doing another series soon.
00:31:55
Speaker
So the one thing that I've been thinking about with these is picking a time. So like I've picked, noon seems to work or right around noon seems to work because you hit the West Coast folks, you know, there are three are behind you and I or East Coast time. And then, you know, I think the UK is now like four or five hours ahead and Germany is six hours ahead. So you kind of get that, but then you miss
00:32:21
Speaker
you know, the rest of the world. So I haven't really figured out like the best way to pick the timing to this. Have you, have you thought about, thought about that? And like, are you trying to pick a consistent time or just say, well, just do kind of random times so that I try to get as many people as I can.
00:32:36
Speaker
I'm actually doing, yeah, I thought about that and I was kind of doing some research on what would be the right time. I think 11 a.m. Eastern time, as we are doing today, and I'm going to do that exact same time tomorrow. I think it's arguably one of the best because like you're saying, we get skilled. It's a bit early for the West Coast, but it's manageable and it covers a lot of people in Europe. Some places in Asia, it's already a bit late, but
Resources and Tools for Data Visualization
00:33:03
Speaker
You know, even the other day, I think I was, I was pinging someone was pinging me to make sure that the time, so it's 11am Eastern. But then for them, I think there are somewhere in India, it's going to be 11pm exactly 12 hours later. Right. It's which is a little bit late, right? Granted. Yeah. But it's hot. Yeah, I don't think there's like a specific. No, I think 11.
00:33:24
Speaker
Eastern yeah, that's what I was thinking 11 12. I mean also for the West Coast folks It's 8 a.m. But people don't have to commute now. So yeah, you can sort of show up without being ready for work, you know, because you don't necessarily have to show your screen so so Zainab and excuse me if I pronounced your name wrong, but but he's in Pakistan says it's 9 o'clock there So, you know, maybe that's as far as we can kind of go at this 11
00:33:54
Speaker
But there is a question about tools and resources that you would suggest for someone who's getting started in database. I don't know if you have, you know, specific tools or things that you would recommend, but. Oh, I mean, tools. What was the question? Oh, you have tools and? And resources. And resources. The field keeps changing. I mean, actually, I was putting together a few slides for this webinar tomorrow.
00:34:21
Speaker
And I keep mentioning the profusion of tools that exist now on data visualization is just incredible. Like when I joined the community, you know, it was still a very sort of academic practice. This was like 15, 16 years ago.
00:34:34
Speaker
You would have to actually know a lot of coding programming languages to actually make any substantial effort in this area. And you probably recall that, John. It was just not as it is today at all. So I think it's for the best, but now it's hard to keep track of how many tools exist. If whoever asks that question, I can actually send them a link of resources. I keep track of some of the resources
00:35:02
Speaker
I think visualizing data actually has a good page. Yeah, that's a really good page. I think it's just basically for all types of data visualization related tools. It's so hard to keep track. It's like in the hundreds, right?
00:35:16
Speaker
And I think it's hard to pick one because it really depends on what you need. So in terms of what you're trying to achieve, what is your fluency with programming languages, there's a full gamut. There's a full range from being completely nervous or design-oriented person to being really familiar with code. And that would change. The number of suggested tools would change depending on that. So that's a really good page to start off.
00:35:44
Speaker
And then books is the same thing, like so many books have come up. I think maybe the angle of some of my books are more historical, sort of background visual culture. If you want to go more into like the deep deep on like the Altu books, there's a bunch of others. I think even visualizing data also has another link on books as well.
00:36:02
Speaker
If you search, if that, yeah, if that person sends me a link, I will ping them to my, I keep a page on Notion that's public for people to that, you know, add this type of questions on resources. I can just ping them.
00:36:16
Speaker
Great, that's great. So, yeah, so, so PingManuel on Twitter, Twitter, okay. So there's a few other questions here and I'll just let people just unmute themselves. So we'll start with Adita and again, excuse me if I'm pronouncing names wrong. So if you want to unmute yourself and just ask Manuel yourself, we can just start there and we can start, sort of start a list.
00:36:45
Speaker
Cool. Thank you. Hi, Manuel. She's from Germany. I totally feel your need of collecting historical examples of getting into a crazy walk through the centuries to see how much data visualization is actually in our genes. I myself am a cartographer and facing now the challenge of trying to
00:37:09
Speaker
organize those wonderful historical examples of storytelling maps, and I was wondering, do you have some sort of a peer-to-peer tip? How do you organize your collections of graphics, of trees, network circles, and so on and so on? That would be great. Yeah, that's a great point. Well, thank you. It's always great to meet a kindred spirit, so thanks for that.
00:37:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot more taxonomies, especially of these old material are needed, right? And I think we need more people like you to investigate that. So I really appreciate what you're doing. So the tools that I used, it was hard. I think it was a mix.
Organizing and Understanding Historical Data
00:37:51
Speaker
So I can also send you the list of institutions, and many of them not only have like illustrations and
00:37:59
Speaker
And I actually thought about doing a blog post at some point, which basically is, again, that list. The list of institutions are making that collections open and freely available for researchers like yourself and myself to use and browse, right? So I think that's something I'm probably going to do at some point and share with the world and community.
00:38:21
Speaker
But that's a good question. So there's a bunch of institutions, and I'm happy to recommend you a few. The Library of Congress is always the easiest in the sense that it's public record. It's in the public domain. So anything that's there, it's safe to use. There's many more in Europe. Of course, institutions, especially tied with universities. There's a bunch. I can send you that list if you are interested.
00:38:45
Speaker
in the process of itself that i used i actually used pinterest believe it or not i used pinterest to make sense of some of these images i was uncovering and to discover the patterns right the themes that i was uncovering because sometimes a lot of the themes and this is you know me looking back at let me just show you here for a moment so if if you haven't seen one of my books they always start all three of them start with a taxonomy in the very
00:39:12
Speaker
You know, first page of this. This is the taxonomy of the book of circles. Right. And these taxonomy is really hard. These taxonomy doesn't is not in my minds.
00:39:24
Speaker
when I submit the book proposal at all. It's a taxonomy that emerges through the research that I'm doing, right? Collecting all these examples, trying to put them in groups and categories. And the taxonomy kind of emerges naturally through that process. And for that process, I use Pinterest a lot to actually start making sense of similarities, resemblances between some of the motifs and some of the styles that people were using.
00:39:51
Speaker
And then I also use Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator, just an application that allows you to draw, but I would be basically collecting all these images and putting them in a really massive digital whiteboard of sorts, right? And again, grouping them in ways that made sense.
00:40:08
Speaker
And then the great thing about doing a taxonomy like that for the book, and I'm just going to show it again, is that it is both the taxonomy of all the types, in this case are the seven families of 21 typologies of circular diagrams, right? But it also is a way for you to, it's also a table of contents, right? It also has a link to the number
00:40:32
Speaker
where each category starts, so you can jump into a specific category in the book, right? So that's why I think taxonomies are really important, not just from a research contribution, but also even in a book like that, it allows you to actually understand the whole practice through it.
Educating in Visual Literacy and Collaboration
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting.
00:40:51
Speaker
So Francesca has a question slash comment for you, which I think is a really good one about talking the data vis language and reading the vis language. So, okay, there she is, yeah.
00:41:07
Speaker
Hello. Hi, Manola, everybody. Thank you. I use your book at school quite widely. I teach some data visualization design curriculum from a very graphic point of view, so they're a very, very useful instrument.
00:41:27
Speaker
I want to share a comment with everybody which is like we say in classroom that you can learn how to create data visualization but then you also need to learn how to read data visualization and because there's a language like the capacity of talking and listening need to be developed.
00:41:46
Speaker
like along one another otherwise like you're not really talking to anybody right so um i appreciate the books because i think that they they slow down the process and they really requires i mean you can also go through very quickly and just they are just like beautiful but if you want to understand them they slow down the process and they demand
00:42:08
Speaker
Time for the understanding and the listening, which is something that I feel digital tools doesn't require so explicitly. So if I think about even in the last several weeks, all of the news feed are absolutely
00:42:26
Speaker
bombed by so many visualization kinds, so many charts, so many things and lines that grows and decrease. And I'm not sure what is the, what normal people, ordinary people really understand out of that because I'm not sure they have the instrument to actually receive so much information packed and processed in such a
00:42:49
Speaker
a condensed language. Well, this is the comment, if I can have a question, it's more like, how do you think about the capacity of people of reading visualization nowadays? So how much the fast piece of the production of the visualization
00:43:07
Speaker
gets along with the speed of people to being able to read in them. And what we can do as designers or educators or just people that is like visual communicator to help this capacity of reading to increase, you know, to make these tools really useful for the people that receive them.
00:43:32
Speaker
That's great. I love your connection with language and maybe not coincidentally my webinar next week, which I hope to do it again. And hopefully when I do the second series, you can join that one, Francesca.
00:43:49
Speaker
It's called the language of data visualization. And I'm going to start the webinar by this hypothetical scenario that tomorrow you're going to face an alien that comes and comes to Earth and asks you what a cat is, the animal. And then you try to explain by using a series of descriptors. It's wild. It's this or that. You can try to explain a predator. You try to explain what a cat is.
00:44:17
Speaker
Now, the understanding of those descriptors would only make sense for the alien if he understands two things, the building blocks of that language, right, of that alphabet. So the ladders that you actually apply, which, by the way, are just one single alphabet, or I think more than 200 known alphabets today, living alphabets that we have on planet Earth, would only make sense if that alien knows
00:44:42
Speaker
What does building blocks are the letters of that those words and the grammar, the rules on how to combine that right without those two things. It would be meaningless to explain and it's the same thing with graphics graphics only makes sense if people understand the building blocks of those graphics right
00:45:00
Speaker
Mostly conveyed through shapes, colors, size, position, right, things of that nature, the visual variables. And the rules on how to combine them, the grammar of graphics. It's the same process. And I go through the webinar, like, what does that mean, the visual decoding of the various nuances of that grammar.
00:45:18
Speaker
But again, answering that, it has to be through education. And I think one of the great things that, for example, John has done, which I love, it's called the graphic continuum. And I'm sure you can also, you should post here as well. It's one of many examples, and I think there's a few other frameworks, but that one specifically, we actually have the poster version. John, I should have mentioned this in the beginning.
00:45:40
Speaker
We have the poster version at Google and we have the little desktop version as well. And it's super useful because again, it allows you to understand it's a connection between, you know, what type of data you have, what do you want to achieve with that data and the suggested chart. Right. And I think it's a really, like, it's, it's a mental tool. It's a mental process. And you have to like practice. There's a little bit of language, right? Like I have my five-year-old Chloe here and she's just learning.
00:46:06
Speaker
The, the language, the written language right the building blocks, the letters and how to combine them. And you can see the brain adapting to this new knowledge right with graphic language. It's the same thing. And we cannot expect people to just get it and understand it because imagine how long it took you or any of us here to learn
00:46:27
Speaker
written language and to master it right to a point where we're really comfortable with it it takes years right and now all of a sudden we are expecting that we can put in front in front of people some really complex charts and then just expect them that they would just understand it it doesn't happen that way right so I think it's our job especially your job Francisco as well as as an educator to really teach this because the nuances of that language are really important for people to understand especially as
00:46:56
Speaker
As an example, we are more and more relying on charts, as we now see with, of course, the coronavirus epidemic. And now it's becoming really ubiquitous than the amount of charts. Also because we have a bias of accuracy when we actually see a chart. We perceive that to be more accurate. And it's a bias, as many biases that we have.
00:47:17
Speaker
And actually, one of my favorite Wikipedia pages is the list of cognitive biases. It's a great page. And if you are a designer or anyone dealing with data visualization, you should go to that page because you really understand that's a genesis of a lot of principles we used for
00:47:35
Speaker
communicating information and data, right? So one of them is that bias that exists. So if that bias is very prevalent across populations, and if they're not educated, right, or not to reading and interpreting charts, it's a problem, right? There's a lot of possibility for misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much.
00:47:55
Speaker
Yeah, that was great. Great question. Great discussion. Oksana has a question on learning code. I don't know if she wants to. Yeah. Should designers UX graphic code, in your opinion? Again, it really depends on what you want to achieve, Oksana. It really does. I don't think it's a need, per se. You can easily partner with someone else. I think, to be honest, sometimes, and I feel this also as a UX manager,
00:48:25
Speaker
Being familiar with some of the startups, I think designers are being asked to do too much these days. They are being asked to do research, they are being asked to do code, and they are expected to do all of these things equally well and achieve great success and impact on all those things together.
00:48:42
Speaker
I think it's a lot to ask. And it really takes the emphasis on doing one thing really well. And I think no matter how people tell me about and try to sell me the concept of unicorns, I've never met a person like that. Maybe I've met actually a couple, but those are really, really hard to find.
00:48:59
Speaker
And these people might not be super happy with their work-life balance either. My advice is like, yes, I would say if you want to learn code, I think there's nothing that you shouldn't do. I think it's always worth it. Just explore something new. Learn a new skill set. That can only bring good things to you on a personal basis, right?
00:49:23
Speaker
It will challenge you and it would actually allow you to expand your mind in different ways. But I don't think that's a need. No one will hire you expecting that skill if you are being hired as a designer. So I don't think there's a need on the market for that. I think it's more of a personal option. For example, I did a lot of coding in the past to do some of the projects that I did.
00:49:46
Speaker
I think I'm unable to be as good as coding as I am in other things. I would rather partner with someone that's really good at coding, and that can focus on other things. And through that collaboration, we can achieve better projects altogether.
00:50:02
Speaker
I think that's a great answer because I agree. I feel like everybody wants to be a unicorn and a lot of people who hire want unicorns and neither of those things are. They're called unicorns for a reason because they don't exist.
00:50:19
Speaker
Right. I mean, and I would also extend that just as sort of as an aside, that especially in the moment that we're in with all these visualizations coming out about COVID and the pandemic, there's a lot of people creating visualizations who
00:50:34
Speaker
maybe they should not be creating visualizations because they don't know enough about the spread of a disease and public health and epidemiology and maybe it's just human nature where we kind of think that we know more than we do and instead we should be asking for help.
00:50:51
Speaker
And this theme has come up a bunch of times on these discussions in a podcast I recently did. But I think it's not just on what we expect people to do in their job with the tools, but also what we expect people to sort of publish and put out into the world. There seems to be this expectation of like doing too much and maybe we should be relying on each other a little bit more.
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think to be honest, like the whole idea of unicorns or like the notion of product designers, which is something that a term that has, you know, according to the whole startup community. To be honest, I think it was just a cheap way of startups to get what they needed for a really low price. Right. I mean, yes, if I need to hire like a researcher, a designer and a software engineer, I would have to pay three times. If I got one person that does all three.
00:51:42
Speaker
You know, that's great. So, but I don't think that should be the guiding force for, for, you know, any of you to like live your life through, right. How did you to save money?
00:51:54
Speaker
I was just thinking I got in trouble for making this exact case at a conference at one of the academic conferences. This is several years ago where I said, you need to have a team, right? You need someone who can do the web development and you need someone who can do the statistics and the data. You need someone who can do the design. You need all these different pieces and there are no unicorns. And I got all these computer science graduate students after the talk saying, I can do this. I'm the unicorn.
00:52:23
Speaker
Yeah because you're in graduate school right now but like what happens when you go to work and you have 500 competing things to do today you just it's just not it's just not a ten you you know it's just not something that's gonna gonna work for anyone. That's a really good point. I mean at the same time I think it's definitely useful like especially if you're working in a triad like that you know if you are a designer and you're working you know side by side with engineers
00:52:47
Speaker
and product managers and other roles and researchers and whatnot. It's always good, of course, to understand their roles. You don't have to be an expert in research or an expert in necessarily software development, but you need to understand the basics of it so that you know the limitations, you know what they struggle with. But that is to say about everything. There's always a lot of
00:53:10
Speaker
a lot of aspects that we designers have to explain what we do so that people understand. I think engineers and researchers also need to explain to designers what they do so that everyone is on the same level playing field. Even internally, I remember doing that like every time there's like a new project, a new collaborative project.
00:53:28
Speaker
the best way to start a project is by everyone explaining what they do, what they bring to the table, right, and how to best collaborate with them. That would just clear the water immediately because now you know what you can rely on that person for, right, and it's much clearer because instead there's a lot of, again, misunderstandings that people don't really understand what role, what kind of contribution they can do, how to collaborate with them, it's just avoiding a lot of that process for sure.
00:53:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. We're basically at the end. I don't know. Do you have any last words of wisdom for folks that you want to share? Not really. I just hope everyone is safe. And I'm happy that you're doing this, John. I think it's really good.
00:54:11
Speaker
Francesca before, like, I think all of us doing and trying to educate the public on some of these issues, right? I think it can only bring good things, right? And I think, you know, visual literacy is definitely an issue. And I think we all collectively need to work on it in different ways. It's through, you know, initiatives like this one, through webinars, through whatever educational platforms we can create. I think it's a really like important call to action for us to all be involved in.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:54:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. I'll just quickly, before we close up, just quickly remind everybody that there are, I don't even know what is it, Wednesday? It's like the longest month ever. So tomorrow we'll do, I don't even remember where time we're at, but tomorrow, let's see.
00:55:00
Speaker
especially for people interested in tools, from 10 to 11 a.m. Eastern time, Gregor Eich and Lisa Charlotte Rose from Data Wrapper, they're in Berlin. They are part of the team on Data Wrapper, so they'll be here to talk about the tool and other stuff. And then Friday afternoon from two to three Eastern time, Enrico Bertini and Mark Steffener from the Data Stories podcast will be here to talk.
00:55:22
Speaker
about the stuff that they're working on. And then just as a quick preview for next week, I have four of the five days all set. But on Wednesday, I'll be doing this on my own, and I'll be teaching Data Vis for kids. So if you have kids, Manuel, you mentioned this about your daughter earlier. That's awesome. Yeah. So I'm going to try to do a little virtual Data Vis class for kids. So all your kid needs, or you, doesn't matter.
00:55:50
Speaker
uh they just need a piece of paper and some colored pencils um and we're gonna i'll talk for a little bit and then we'll actually be making some things so but we'll all be analog can can my daughter join as well of course of course it's totally open so yeah what time is that um i well you know what i was just thinking of it and i i think i'm gonna do it at 11 because you said 11 is a good time so i think i'll do 11
00:56:13
Speaker
Because I think about kids on the east coast in San Francisco, they're probably up early anyways, so maybe their parents would say go be online for an hour. So we'll do 11am on Wednesday and then we can get out to out to Pakistan at least.
00:56:30
Speaker
That's great. Great. Carbon is good because it opens appetite for lunch as well. Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. All right, everybody. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Manuel. Thanks so much. This was a lot of fun. It was great. Be sure to check out his books. And I think if you have other questions, just ping him on Twitter. And if you have any questions for me, ping me on Twitter or at the Urban website, wherever, and we can share more resources.
00:56:56
Speaker
Great everybody stay safe stay healthy and be well and we'll see you soon. Thanks a lot. Bye everybody Thanks. See everyone
00:57:07
Speaker
Thanks for everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the podcast. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you learned a little something about Manuel's process and about his love of circles and his love of trees. If you'd like to support the podcast, please consider sharing it and letting other folks know about the show. Consider writing a review on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider.
00:57:28
Speaker
or if you'd like to support the show financially, please head over to my Patreon page for just a couple of dollars per month. You can help me afford things like audio transcription, audio editing, webcasting, web hosting, all the things that are needed to bring this show to you. So I hope you are well, I hope you are safe, and until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.