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Episode #65: Nadieh Bremer
184 Plays8 years ago
Welcome back to the show! I’m super excited to chat with Nadieh Bremer on this week’s show. Nadieh is an astronomer by training who came to love data visualization. (Does anyone come to data visualization directly??). Her projects include web-based interactive...
The post Episode #65: Nadieh Bremer appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Nadia Bremmer
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. And on this week's show, I'm very excited to have with me Nadia Bremmer from Visual Cinnamon and a variety of other awesome projects and websites. Nadia, welcome to the show. Thank you for inviting me. It's really cool to be here. Well, I'm very excited to have you on the show. We have a lot to talk about, but I want to start by first congratulating you on your Information is Beautiful Award, the Rising Star Award of 2016. That's got to feel pretty good.
00:00:41
Speaker
Oh, yes, yes, it was. I was asleep during the ceremony, so I didn't know at all. And then I woke up and my Twitter was like, boom, what's going on? And then I saw what I wanted. I was just I'm still floating on a cloud even a week later.
00:00:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's great and it's well deserved and we're going to talk a lot about your different projects. But why don't we start by having you introduce yourself and for those of you who are listening, we are going to have a big announcement at the end of this show. So stay tuned. Nadia has an important announcement for those of you who are listening. So stay tuned. But before we get there, we have lots to talk about. So Nadia, maybe you can talk a little bit about your background because
00:01:21
Speaker
As with most people who are involved in data visualization these days, you have sort of an interesting origin story.
Transition from Astronomy to Data Visualization
00:01:28
Speaker
Yes, so about five years ago I graduated as an astronomer, so not very typical indeed. Not really knowing what I wanted to do in the world of business. So I went to a lot of different business courses and such and I came into contact with Deloitte where they were just setting up an analytics section.
00:01:46
Speaker
That sounded perfect. Still trying to find insights from the data, but now we're no longer about stars, sadly. But I mean, transactions and stores and other stuff was still fun to get my hands into. As a consultant, you're always the external party, so you often have to convey your findings that you have from the data and algorithms to the client. That's how I got into data visualization. The more I was visualizing the data, the more that I came to understand that
00:02:15
Speaker
I love that part even more than the analysis. It's like I was spending way more hours on getting the visualization right than on getting like 1% more accuracy. Did you miss the like the astronomer part of you? Was that like yearning to get out and visualize the galaxies? Maybe, maybe why?
00:02:34
Speaker
I do believe that astronomy is a very visual part of the sciences and just look at any Hubble image and you can put that on your wall. So maybe there was always this sort of visual part that I had that made me choose astronomy about physics, for example.
Understanding SVG in D3
00:02:50
Speaker
Now I think one of the first projects that I sort of became familiar with you was your OpenVizCon from last year where you're talking about SVG. So can you maybe start by defining SVG for those who aren't familiar with and sort of what your expertise is and how you use D3 in your work?
00:03:08
Speaker
Yes. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphic. You create shapes, but not really in the pixel sense of the word. Instead, you define how the shapes should look with words and numbers. It's more like a text file where you say, for example, I want to have a line and it should start 10 pixels from the left and 10 pixels from the top, and it should end at 100 pixels from the left and 200 pixels from the top.
00:03:34
Speaker
And the circle, for example, has a low central location and a radius. And the advantage of this sort of writing out of your shapes that you want to create is that you can scale it. And no matter how small or how big you make it, it will always look very sharp on the screen. So you have no pixelation.
00:03:51
Speaker
You just multiply the numbers within that file in a sense. And they're all separate elements. So when you have something in a browser, all of these lines, the circles, they are separate elements drawn by your browser. And you can then easily attach events to this. Like if you hover over this circle, this should happen. If you hover over a line, that should happen because they're all sort of separate existing elements. It's not like
00:04:17
Speaker
an image where you have 200 pixels by 200 pixels. But really, the main reason that I started using is because SVGs really are the building blocks of D3. So practically, all D3 visualizations are completely made up of SVGs. That was really the main reason. And then afterwards, I started to investigate how and what can I do more with SVGs than just creating circles and lines and rectangles and such.
Complexities of Using Color in Data Visualization
00:04:41
Speaker
Right.
00:04:42
Speaker
And you had mentioned color. Is color trickier in D3 than in other languages? Or is color just tricky all the time irrespective of the tool? Well, I find that
00:04:55
Speaker
color can be tricky like in any form of visual design but maybe most difficult in data visualization because then calling really gets like a meaning different colors to separate different countries so they have to be easily distinguishable and look good together right but I find that this is sort of true regardless of the tool and to be honest I find it that these three actually helps me more than other tools because I
00:05:19
Speaker
Say you want to use colors to convey a range of numbers, like from the lowest revenue to the highest revenue, I only have to supply the color for the lowest revenue, which could be blue and another color for the highest value, which could be green. Using these three functions, you can then request any color that falls in between those two number ranges. So I actually find that these three makes it easier for me to use colors because of these sort of helpful scalings and such.
00:05:47
Speaker
Can I ask, is the SVG, the vector graphics, is this something that's new to people who are coding in JavaScript? Is this something that just hasn't been taken advantage of? Why are people now paying so much? They seem like they're paying so much more attention to this. It's just because you gave this awesome talk at OpenViz and everyone's like, oh, I should be doing this. Why is it all of a sudden seems to be a bigger conversation than it was even a year ago?
00:06:12
Speaker
To be honest, I don't really know and I do know the SPGs have been around for quite some time and But why they haven't been used before I think In terms of data visualization, I think these three was the first one that actually used them But people are also now really trying to coming to understand like good forms of animation and what you and especially how that is
00:06:36
Speaker
combined with the use of SVG and animations. And you see a lot more in that as well. A lot of people doing wonderful stuff with that as well. I don't know, maybe the time was right for it.
00:06:47
Speaker
I truly don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I know. It seems like the adoption of D3 than the adoption of sort of the other elements that go into it. Very interesting. Well, I will post the link to your OpenViz conference talk because it was fantastic, but I want to talk now move to one of your recent projects.
Collaboration on DataSketches with Shirley Wu
00:07:03
Speaker
You and Shirley Wu are working on a project called DataSketches, which is a really fun project month to month. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you're doing?
00:07:12
Speaker
goals are, or if it's just sort of a fun thing for you for you two to do every every month? Yeah, well, it sort of is. So it was it was like June of this year, and I've met Shirley through slack channel, and then I met her at open biz, and we were just chatting about some stuff and
00:07:30
Speaker
I remember at some point that I was thinking about what I had done in terms of personal projects in last year and I could only think of one thing and that made me actually kind of sad. I wanted to do, I mean, creating projects is one of the things I like the most and I spend all my time on creating tutorials and presentations, which is fine, but I really love creating projects.
00:07:51
Speaker
and Shirley had just quit her job to go freelance and she also wanted to create more projects and explore the more artful and creative side of data visualization and at some point she just said well why don't we collaborate for a year and then so that we force ourselves to create one data visualization a month so instead of thinking well um this week maybe not maybe next week you have to do something because Shirley is also doing something so it would be a shame
00:08:18
Speaker
So I really love that concept. So each month we decide on a topic for which we both create a visualization and we are completely free to do whatever we want within that topic. So we get two very different visuals that are somehow still connected. But what was also very important to us is that we write about the process. So from data to sketching to coding it up.
00:08:40
Speaker
And that was most I don't you don't really remember anymore why we decided to do that. But it's now we feel that it can show other people that we also sometimes don't know where we're going or where we came from and that we make mistakes. And but eventually you can have something that you're proud of visualization.
00:09:01
Speaker
Right. Can you talk a little bit about your process? So these are all online interactive, at least the ones I've seen so far, are all online. They're all interactives. Can you talk a little bit about your
Process of Creating Visualizations
00:09:10
Speaker
process? How do you conceptualize the project and then ultimately get to the coding and building it up? Are you starting in the analog world? Are you starting sketching and drawing? Or are you sort of getting the data right into the computer and into the browser and start making things right away?
00:09:28
Speaker
So we usually start with finding out what data do we have. So we pick a topic at the start of the month. We have some ideas and then we pick a topic. And then I just start Googling on the topic and then thinking also a bit just offline about, okay, so what do I find interesting within this topic? So for example, with the movies, well, my favorite trilogy was the Lord of the Rings. So I thought, well, I'll try and find, I'll see what data is available about Lord of the Rings. Okay. I like where you're going so far. Yeah.
00:09:59
Speaker
So then sometimes I won't be able to find something that I'm looking for. Sometimes I might be surprised. For example, with the Lord of the Rings, I found a data set about the number of words set by each character during each scene of all three extended editions. And I'm like, wow, I just need to use this.
00:10:17
Speaker
And then we go into a sketching phase and we decided upfront that all the sketching would be done. We try to do everything on paper just because it gives you more freedom. Your pen can do whatever you want and that's not always true for tools. So we sketch on paper and just try to be creative, not thinking about any limitations.
00:10:39
Speaker
And in the last two weeks of a month, we typically have to try and code out whatever we have thought of during the sketching phase. And sometimes we find that if you plug in the data, something might not work and you have to tweak your ideas.
00:10:55
Speaker
Usually, for now, it's been working pretty well. We share screenshots of stuff that we do with each other, so we give each other feedback. Maybe you can try this, maybe you can try that. Usually, within two weeks, we hope to finish the coding itself and what we take in screenshots along the way so that we can also write about it and such.
00:11:17
Speaker
Now, one of the sort of most celebrated projects from last year was the Dear Data project from Georgia Loopy and Stephanie Postovic. Did that project serve as an inspiration for this at all?
00:11:27
Speaker
Yes and no. I mean, Dear Data really is an amazing project and I'm sure that sort of made the idea of a collaboration more accessible in our minds. But when Shirley first proposed the idea, it wasn't really coming from Dear Data. We just wanted to learn from each other and work together and force ourselves to create projects.
00:11:48
Speaker
Only after chatting about ideas and thinking about how to give it shape did one of us sort of say, well, two women doing a collaboration. That's very much like their data, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, there's differences. Obviously, it's analog versus online interactives. And I think you're talking more about the process than they did. And sort of helping people along the way learn how to build similar types of things and learn the technologies.
00:12:17
Speaker
Yes, exactly. So that was also a point like we thought about it and we found that we came from a very different mindset and goal than them. So we just continued with it. And then we were like, yeah, some people are going to say that we're like,
00:12:32
Speaker
a deer data spinoff or something. We would know better and we have been inspired by deer data definitely, but we did this for ourselves. So can you talk a little bit about the other tools that you're using? Do you have a suite of tools that you're using and maybe Shirley's using something or something different? Obviously everything is now, you're building everything at the end product is all in JavaScript and D3, but what's your sort of process all the way through even as you're exploring data and
00:13:01
Speaker
You know, the tools that you're using to download the data or scrape the data. Yes. So I mostly for data preparation, I'm using R because that's what I, what I use during my more data scientist years. And so when I'm trying to find the data, sometimes that could just be a Google spreadsheet or a CSV file that can handle a download, or I sometimes I have to scrape something and I try to figure out the.
00:13:24
Speaker
the systematic to understanding like URLs to do that through a programming programmatic way. But then I always go into R so I do my web scraping through R or I read in the raw data in R and then from there I start making aggregations or checking the data or making
00:13:47
Speaker
getting rid of everything that I don't need. So for me, that data preparation really is R. But Shirley, for example, she's very familiar in JavaScript and Node, so she's been using all kinds of packages that have been available for Node to do things with the data, like very, very fascinating things like automatic screenshots and other stuff that I have no idea how to do.
00:14:10
Speaker
But then we both really just take it into D3, so HTML, CSS, JavaScript, that combination. And I'm not really actually using any other frameworks. I used underscore at some point to do some data preparation, final stuff for large rings.
Tools and Techniques Used by Nadia and Shirley
00:14:30
Speaker
But that's mostly because I only know a few of those frameworks. Shirley, for example, she's very good at React. She uses that a lot. But from my astronomy background, I never learned that. So it's always tricky for me to figure out which I should learn. And for now, I've just been fine handling and just using D3.
00:14:50
Speaker
Although, on a very rare occasion, I take things into Illustrator to do something that is not just not possible in the browser, and I have some image in my mind, like using elfish and dwarfish fonts. That's not really typical web font stuff. Right. Are there any of these projects that you've done so far that stand out for you, that you
00:15:16
Speaker
Know really fell in love with either in terms of the process of building it or the final project the final product or Something about it that you know you love about the about that particular project relative to some of the other ones Well I I do like my
Olympic Visualization Project
00:15:36
Speaker
August one, that's about the Olympics, in which I visualized all the 5,000 gold medalists that have been in the Summer Olympics since the first Olympic Games in 1896. And that's because
00:15:51
Speaker
It's called Olympic feathers. But if you look at the visual right now, it just looks like five circles. And that's because I wanted to I was actually creating feathers from the start. But that eventually got scrapped because I showed it to a friend of mine who's a designer and whose opinion I trust. And he told me, well, you really need to lose the feather shape and just go with circles. And I'm like, Oh, no, because I
00:16:16
Speaker
I really I'd spend quite some time learning how to programmatically again that we're done create the feather shape and create these nice arches and such so I still have a lot of screenshots of how the
00:16:32
Speaker
The project looked when all of these circles were still sort of circles with feathers that I sometimes try to show people like, look, this is how it used to look. This is for the best, but you know, they were actually feathers at some point. That's what I like about that one.
00:16:51
Speaker
So you mentioned that you have a designer friend that you bounce ideas off and you and Shirley talk about different aspects of the project, be it the design or the code. How important do you think it is for other people who are out there working to have, either to be working within a team or to have those sorts of resources to bounce ideas off and to work through sketches?
00:17:15
Speaker
I think that is very important. The most important thing I find is having somebody to bounce your ideas off. I find that even more important than working in a team, sometimes it's okay to do something on your own, but you can get stuck in a certain mindset or be blinded by other possibilities once you've settled on an idea.
00:17:38
Speaker
talking to somebody else, they can give you interesting insights. You might not always agree with them, but the ones that do stick make a lot of difference, I find. If you just have a friend, they don't even have to be experts in the field. You can just show any friend and see how they react. I think it can't hurt. You can only learn stuff from it that will improve your visual.
00:18:05
Speaker
Great. Well, this is some incredible work. Your website, Visual Cinnamon, is home of some terrific work. So congratulations on all that. Thank you. And congrats on the Rising Star Award again. Although now, I'm not even sure you're rising so much. I feel just like star is more appropriate. But before we close up, we promise people that we have a little announcement or a big announcement, depending on your perspective. So I'm going to let you go ahead and make that announcement.
00:18:34
Speaker
Yes.
Freelancing and Future Plans
00:18:35
Speaker
So I've been thinking about this for quite some time and quite some people have been asking me about it, but I have finally decided to go into freelancing. Congratulations. Yeah. That's great. So what are you hoping to work on? What are your goals? Are you, are you going to be, you know, is, is this the sort of work that you hope to be doing for, for people, for clients, you know, where, where are you headed?
00:18:59
Speaker
Yeah, so I hope what I hope is actually that I'm going to create visualizations that are sort of in line with data sketches and what I'm doing on visual cinemas. And that's for one particular data set, you want to show the insights and every insights that it has in a sort of maybe a bit more engaging or artistic way. So more like one offs and not dashboards, but just having
00:19:25
Speaker
these sort of pieces in itself. But they can be static and they can be interactive. That's not a problem. But that's where I hope to end up. But I will have to see if the market is there for me. Yeah. Well, I'm sure it is because you do some great work and congratulations. And good luck on all of that. Thank you. Nadi, it's been great having you on the show. Thanks so much for coming on.
00:19:47
Speaker
Thank you again for inviting me. And so if you are looking for Nadia Bremmer and you need some terrific Data Vis work, explorations, online tools, static tools, you can find her on Twitter at Nadia Bremmer. You can also find her at visualcineman.com and I will post all of these links on the show page. So thanks again, Nadia, and thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode. Until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.