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Episode #53: Jen Christiansen
140 Plays8 years ago
Welcome back to The PolicyViz Podcast. Episode #53, if you’re keeping count. On this week’s show, I’m happy to chat with Jen Christiansen, Senior Graphics Editor at Scientific American. We talk about a whole range of issues this week, folks:...
The post Episode #53: Jen Christiansen appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Introduction to MICA's Info Visualization Program
00:00:00
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This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by the Maryland Institute College of Art. MICA's professional graduate program in information visualization trains designers and analysts to translate data into compelling visual narratives, benefit from the resources of a premier College of Art and Design while learning online.
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Earn your information visualization degree in just 15 months. Expert faculty
Meet the Faculty: Andy Kirk and John Schwabisch
00:00:25
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includes Andy Kirk, John Schwabisch, Marissa Peacock, and Rob Rolleston. Learn more
Guest Introduction: Jen Christensen
00:00:30
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at mica.edu slash MPSInvis.
00:00:46
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Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. This week on the show, I'm very happy to be pleased by friend, senior graphics editor at Scientific American, Jen Christensen.
Scientific American's Monthly Cycle and Web Transition
00:00:58
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Jen, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, John. Jen, really great to see you or talk to you again. How are things at Scientific American?
00:01:05
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They're going well. We just closed an issue of the magazine, which we're still on this monthly cycle for the print issue that then has this other kind of weekly noise and web news pieces going on. But we definitely kind of have that exhale after the monthly issue goes out. I was wondering, do you get to exhale? Is the exhale a couple of minutes or is it a couple of hours? It's probably more like a couple of minutes these days. In the past, it was a couple of hours.
00:01:35
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you must feed the web beast. You sign off on the print proofs and then you take a few breaths, a few slugs of coffee and turn attention to web. And the next issue too. Right, of course. Well, can
Jen's Role at Scientific American
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we start by talking a little bit, maybe about yourself a little bit, introduce yourself for those who don't know you, and then maybe you can start talking a little bit about the team at Scientific American and what it takes to sort of pull together a graphic either for the print or for the web version.
00:02:05
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Sure, yes. So as you mentioned, I'm senior graphics editor at Scientific American. I actually came out of the tradition of science illustration. So I studied geology and art, then merged the two in science illustration, actually interned at Scientific American in around 96, and started working there in the late 90s, left for a job at National Geographic. So I was doing art direction and then design there.
00:02:34
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freelance for a bit, and then found myself right back around at Scientific American. So where now I do exclusively graphics. When I first started there, I was doing an art direction of like entire kind of articles. But now we've kind of reconfigured things so that we have more singular roles. So I work on the graphics. Well, I guess I should start with saying that there's six of us now in the art department. Okay. There's my boss, the design director, Michael Mark.
00:03:03
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an art director who lays out the print magazine and commissions the editorial illustrations, kind of the opening art, that sort of thing. We've got an online art director who manages the look of what's going on there, a photo editor, and then me, the graphics editor. And then just about a year ago, we added an assistant graphics editor, which I'm thrilled about. So yeah.
Creating Graphics for News and Features
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So Amanda Montano's now and I are sort of the two, we're the graphics team. There's two of us now, which is, which is fabulous.
00:03:32
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Just how does the process work? Are you pitching stories? Are stories being sort of passed down to you and then you're pulling it all the way through? Because what's really interesting, I think, about Scientific American is that the graphics and the articles are so closely woven together.
00:03:46
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Right. Well, there's two general categories to the kinds of pieces that we develop graphics for. There's the news items and then longer feature articles. So there's sort of two different approaches to those. The news items are what generally go up online and they're shorter and snappier pieces in the print magazine as well.
00:04:07
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And those, I mean, we have weekly news meetings with the editors. The text editors all have specific content beats. So they're proposing, you know, they're keeping an eye on what's going on in their area of specialty and proposing news pieces. Amanda is
Overcoming Challenges in Science Graphics
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the primary point person for those news pieces. So she sits in on.
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Those news meetings proposes graphics or response to requests for them. And those sorts of things happen in about a week. They're usually fairly focused on a data set that's already been identified.
00:04:39
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For the features and the articles that end up with a print magazine, those are a bit of a longer process. We're generally working with a scientist as an expert author. So we ask them for ideas, but then we also just kind of go through their past publications and then I'll propose some ideas as well based on the preliminary manuscript.
00:05:02
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But then we work pretty closely with the text editor, the expert author, and myself in sort of developing a graphic concept and kind of going through them for fact check and feedback. Right. How is that experience or how is that relationship when you're working with the experts, when you're working with the scientists, and how do you sort of walk them through this idea that the research article you published in the academic journal is going to be a little bit different when it comes up in Scientific American?
00:05:31
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Yeah, it's interesting. It's usually one of two responses. Either the scientist is like, well, yeah, it's a different type of audience and that sort of thing. And they're really excited to be a part of having somebody else kind of take a fresh look and re-visualize their work.
00:05:48
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And then I think others are maybe a little confused as to why we're not just doing exactly how they published it. You know, sort of makes sense. I mean, they know their information better than anyone else, but, and sometimes it's kind of hard to take a few steps back and realize that, well, you know, to extend that message to another audience, we might need to do some things like shake out some jargon and think about different graphic forms. Right.
00:06:13
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And so if you could ask the research, the scientific community at large, like if there was one thing you'd want them to do so that to make your job easier and make your life easier, like what would that one thing be?
Scientists and Data Format Savviness
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Well, if you asked me about, I don't know, a couple of years ago, I would say free your data from PDFs.
00:06:32
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But actually, recently, generally, because we're asking for the raw data in most cases. And more and more often, they're not just even coming in as Excel spreadsheets, but we're actually getting CSV files as well. So I think folks are more and more savvy about that, which makes sense.
00:06:52
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But so that's nice, so you don't have to worry about that now. But I think it's interesting. And I'm an outsider looking in, but I look at a lot of scientific papers. And there seems to be kind of two camps. One is really embracing new tools and thinking through data visualization and sort of as a designer. And clearly, there seems to be maybe like the newer wave of graduate students that end up being the ones that I correspond with sometimes.
00:07:20
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are really savvy in a lot of these new tools. But then there's also kind of a set of folks who sort of do the figures, because you're supposed to have the figure in the, or at least this is my perception as an outsider, you're supposed to have a figure to display your data in your paper, because that's what you do. But there's not really a sense that there's a critical eye being put on them. It's like, if your data is not continuous, then maybe you shouldn't use that form.
00:07:48
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about it. It's okay if you're using a bar chart or a line chart. Those are great graphic forms, but just kind of look at it with a fresh eye and try to determine which one of those might
00:07:59
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make the most sense for your data set. So that's just kind of looking at the graphics rather than just churning them out. On the other hand, that leaves room for us to add value as journalists. So a bit selfishly, sometimes I'm glad when I stumble upon something that can be improved upon because I can add something to this conversation, I guess.
From Science Illustration to Data Collaboration
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I want to turn back a little bit to your experience because you had mentioned that you kind of came out of the design, the science illustration world. And so I'm curious now how you're working more with the scientific side and with the data and creating graphics. What was that transition like? I know you had written a piece about this on the Scientific American blog, but I'm curious about how you feel about that transition is going from sort of more of an illustration design side into more of the, you know, maybe a little bit richer or deeper with the data and with the science.
00:08:53
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Well, it's interesting because actually in college I did study geology. So I do have, you know, and actually my thesis was in the sciences. So it was a geology thesis. So I have, you know, I know just enough about statistical measures and things to sort of understand that there are highly loaded words and that certain things meet in very specific things.
00:09:14
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There's certain tests that you should run things through before you can say things. But I don't recall enough of that or I did stay on top of it long enough. I'm not actively running the stats on anything. But it's nice to have just enough knowledge about that for me to then know what kinds of questions to ask at this stage. And also for me to know that I can't just download some data from an open portal and sort of just put the information out there and declare it.
00:09:43
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here's the answer people because I realize that there's a lot more to it than that. So I probably know just enough to keep me hopefully out of trouble. Just enough to be dangerous. I mean that's really interesting. Here and there we see some issues with what's called data journalism. We see some issues with maybe this statistic wasn't presented accurately or
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Do you feel like there's a place for journalists to learn some of these skills? Maybe take a step back and just learn enough to be dangerous. We really don't need everyone to be a statistician, but learn enough statistics, learn enough data analytics to just be dangerous and just be able to have that keen eye of maybe this doesn't look quite right.
00:10:25
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I don't know, this gets a little into scary territory. Yeah, I feel really fortunate in that I cover scientific content. And so most of the projects I work around have already been analyzed. Yeah. Now there's the argument that they need to be analyzed again and again, because we need to be skeptical when looking at results and things should be replicated and
00:10:49
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reproduced and to make sure things are right. But I'm working with information that's already gone through at least one filter and a peer review and that sort of thing. So I worry a little less about that, but I get really nervous when I'm asked to sort of
00:11:09
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jump into an investigative project knowing if there's not that kind of filter going on. Because I can't bring that to the table. I know a few things that need to happen, but I'm not actively practicing that. But it is kind of scary territory. Again, I feel really fortunate that I'm working with scientific content that's already going through some of that.
Adapting Graphics for Digital and Mobile
00:11:35
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You had also mentioned this balance between the online part and the print part. Can you talk a little bit how the online piece of your job and how you and your teammates sort of think about how to publish things online and whether that differs between the desktop experience and the mobile experience? Sure. Yeah. Actually, just over the last year, we've really been ramping up. We had a new web design that unveiled, I guess, just about a year ago now.
00:12:03
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And that was when then Amanda was brought on so that we could start to expand and do more responsive graphics. And we need to be thinking about making all of our print material readable on, you know, if somebody who subscribes to the magazine and wants to read it on their phone instead of the print version, we need to make sure that they can view it there as well.
00:12:25
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So it's been pretty interesting having to think about every graphic and illustration in terms of, okay, here's how we'll play it out on a spread. You know, we have all this real estate, we can do this beautiful big lush illustration, but how does that reconfigure so that somebody can actually
00:12:42
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get something meaningful out of it on their cell phone as well. So it just means that at the very beginning of every project, we're thinking in terms of how might this play out in three different ways. We're doing a lot of scrolling, a lot of re-composing and then just having people scroll through things, but we're looking at trying to figure out other ways of approaching that problem as well, maybe with animated video, motion animation, that sort of thing.
00:13:07
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So when you're thinking about moving a static piece from the print version to the online version, are you thinking, how can we make this interactive? Or are you thinking just what is the best way someone's going to view this? I wonder whether you approach it like, do we need to have a chart that has interactivity because it's online? Or does a static version work just as well? We just need to be thinking about it being responsive and people being able to see it clearly on their phone or on their computer.
00:13:34
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Yeah, number one right now for us is to have a static version that is legible and makes sense and you can see all the information. When we're going from kind of a print mentality towards the web. But for a lot of these news items, in particular a few pieces that Amanda's working on, she's starting to bring some D3 chops to our game. And there the interactivity is more about allowing the reader to
00:14:02
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see the numbers behind it, maybe go to a data link, that sort of thing. So right now, we've kind of paused a little bit on doing really robust interactives until we at least make sure that people can read the information and the punchline that we're delivering in print. And then we're starting to kind of try to layer on a little bit more where it makes sense, but not just for the sake of interactivity.
00:14:26
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Right. How does the responsive design affect the way you think about, especially the print part, as you move it from sitting in a magazine versus an online format where things need to be responsive for different screens and mobile and tablets and all this fun stuff that we have now?
00:14:43
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Right. You know, I used to rely on developing print projects a lot on somebody being able to see like a before and after state at the same time. You can immediately kind of flick their eyes back and forth. And now it's like I have to keep in mind that they've scrolled past that. And they're probably not going to go return to that spot. So it becomes a lot more of trying to
00:15:08
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Realize what you need to leave in if you want them to compare something before and after maybe you know are we gonna have to ghost it and keep it in the second panel or so it's just kind of thinking about through time rather than across space right.
00:15:26
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But we don't want to compromise the print product either. We want people to get the best of what they love out of print, which is sometimes these huge, lush spreads with highly detailed. So it's a balancing act. Yeah, I wonder. I mean, the traditional audience for a place like Scientific American, like National Geographic, that seems to be a print-first audience.
00:15:46
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So do you find that the audience is moving along with you sort of transitioning over to the to the online or it's still sort of a print first audience and you're sort of for the most part, especially for the longer pieces, as you mentioned, you're thinking first print and then think first about print. And now we're going to try to, you know, think about a great way to make this, you know, on an online platform.
00:16:07
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No, we're pushing more and more to thinking digital first, but I think there's still a two-pronged thing we have. As I understand it, and this may have changed, we have slightly different demographics for each of those two products. And we do have a lot more content being refreshed daily on the website, and that's where we're trying to fold in more graphics.
00:16:30
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So I think it really is project dependent like is this a quick news piece that we want as many people as possible to see as quickly as possible and it might not even be destined for print. Then we'll come at it with a very different mentality than sort of a here's a crux story on the Higgs boson that is going to go down in the archive as being written by the author who discovered it you know and we need to have a kind of a definitive
00:16:56
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print piece for record. It really depends on the project. That's interesting. Let me ask one last question. You mentioned that
Archiving Digital Content Concerns
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the archiving of the project and the print version, there seems to be more and more discussion about how we're losing things that show up on the internet. The technology
00:17:15
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disappears or changes and then the project isn't renewed or it's not saved in the right way. How do you and how does Scientific American sort of more generally think about the archiving process of things that are, you know, perhaps these things that are just going online. It's a short turnaround thing. So have you thought about that archiving process? Yeah. And actually we're trying to develop kind of more concrete kind of procedures for that now. I mean, our print stuff all gets archived. And if we're doing digital versions of the print piece, then it's less of a concern
00:17:42
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But some of these pieces that we're doing digital only, we do want to have them set aside. So we are kind of saving out different file types. And we're starting to try to figure out how do we go ahead and
00:17:55
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save those digital files in a way that kind of parallels our print piece. And this is a subject actually that's really near and dear to my heart because I spent a lot of time going through the archive. I'm sort of a geek about it. And it's interesting. I just found out that one of the first computer to plate
00:18:13
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print magazine issues ever was March 1995, Scientific American. But it was a special issue. So it's not part of the usual print run. It's not in the digital archive, which I find so ironic. I can't find it digitally. I had to go like on eBay and get a print copy of it. And yet it was sort of a historic moment. It was the first kind of all desktop publishing issue at the magazine.
00:18:40
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Um, so I worry that the other will be these little black holes of content that we're just going to lose. Yeah. Yeah. Well, very interesting. I want to talk about
Joy Division Album Cover Research
00:18:49
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one last thing before I let you go, um, at your talk and visualize last year, you talked about the joy division cover. So it was a great talk.
00:18:57
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I thought maybe you could give folks a quick summary of that talk. If you're not familiar, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album cover has a, what, a mysterious history up until your first person research, right? Oh, well, thanks. Yeah, actually, I love this topic. A lot of folks knew that it was a data visualization of a pulsar radio frequency signals.
00:19:21
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But, and it had been kind of traced back to most notably the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy and a couple folks had found it in the Scientific American actually where it ran in 1971. The album cover was 79, designed by Peter Seville.
00:19:36
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He saw it in the Cambridge Encyclopedia. And again, a few folks have jumped down that rabbit hole and have found other occurrences of it. I really wanted to get to the bottom of it. So I ended up doing a fair amount of research. It ended up at the Cornell rare book room looking through student PhD theses from the early 70s, late 60s, early 70s, and found the original in a thesis by Harold Kraft.
00:20:01
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who was a student at Cornell at the time. He later became a director at Arecibo, the radio observatory, and then back at Cornell in a higher up role. But I was fortunate enough to have a chance to sit down and talk with him about the data visualization and how he created it.
00:20:17
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He wrote a program in Fortran, that output, that stacked plot. But it's just a really kind of fun, full circle piece where a data visualization becomes a part of pop culture. And then it was nice to kind of bring that back around to, well, what was the original intent of the piece?
00:20:33
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Right. Cool. Well, it was a great talk and I think those videos will come out any day and I will make sure that lots of people get to go see it because it's a really fascinating story. Thanks. So, Jen, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been really interesting. Great. Great talking with you, John. Thanks. And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. As always, if you have comments or questions, please let me know. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks for listening.
00:21:10
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by the Maryland Institute College of Art. MICA's professional graduate program in information visualization trains designers and analysts to translate data into compelling visual narratives, benefit from the resources of a premier College of Art and Design while learning online.
00:21:30
Speaker
Earn your information visualization degree in just 15 months. Expert faculty includes Andy Kirk, John Schwabisch, Marissa Peacock, and Rob Rolleston. Learn more at mica.edu slash MPSInvis.