Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Hope you're well, hope you're having a good week. On this week's episode of the show, we talk about one of my other favorite graphs.
Speaker: This one lunge feeding from Jonathan Coram at the New York Times back in 2007. Yes, we're going im pretty far back on this one. I really love this graphic. This is a ah print, what you'd probably call an infographic at the time.
Speaker: and shows the patterns, the behavior of whales feeding. So they're kind of at the top of the ocean and then they dive down, do their feeding at the bottom of the ocean, then they come back up. And it's a great graphic. If you're watching this on YouTube, I can share the graphic with You you can see it. If not, if you're just listening, I will try to do my best to describe it, but I encourage you to check out the links in the show notes so you can go take a look at it. um There's kind of two main parts to this graphic.
Speaker: On the left side is a little tight little paragraph at the top. It starts with lunge feeding. little paragraph I'll actually read it here. Scientists tracking fin whales have created the first detailed model of how they feed. After gliding the depths of more than 600 feet in search of krill, a fin whale will repeatedly accelerate and open its mouth wide, engulfing about 20 pounds of krill and more than its own weight in water as it grinds to a halt. So on the left sort of part, I'd say probably like maybe a quarter of the of the horizontal space are these five images of the whale, the little the icon of the whale as it's as its mouth opens. And then there's also like a little histogram below each whale with a little text description to the left showing where in the and the in the speed
Speaker: of this behavior the whale is. And so if you imagine kind of like a bell curve where the vertical axis is speed and the horizontal axis is time in seconds, that's what you're kind of getting. And so the histogram is like, it's shaded a little bit and it's got like a line with a dot to show you exactly where the whale is at the time of its mouth open and that in that point.
Speaker: Then the rest of the graphic on the right side is a big, And a blue box showing the depth of the ocean from sea level, obviously, all the way down to about 900 feet.
Speaker: with a yellow line that shows the whale. It's sort of at the top for you know a minute and then it diving down and then it sort of moves, sort of oscillates at the towards the bottom of the ocean and then and then comes back up. And then below that are two other little graphics, one showing the pattern of the of the of the of the fins and then the speed, a little line chart of the speed below it. um I think for me, so this is 2007, so we're going way back here. I think for me, this is one of the first infographics that I would say actually tells a story. um and And lots of people throw around the word data and stories a lot. And I have my own perspectives on on on that as well. um and And basically summarizing is that I think
Speaker: Oftentimes, we are not telling stories with our data. We are just making a point or we are making an argument or we are showing something, but it's not really a story. When this line goes up or this bar is shorter than other bar, it's not a story um in the classic sense of the word story. And I understand there's there's a lot of nuance there and and that's fine.
Speaker: and ah And this is not to say that a story has to have a component of time to it. although perhaps they do. But this graphic does have that ah central component of time of the ah whale having this behavior at the top of the ocean, and then it dives, and then behavior at the bottom of the ocean, and then it rises again. And so it it does have that time component, but I think it really does tell you this story of how these animals behave and what they do over this roughly eight to 10 minute period
Speaker: period in their in their and their lives. And there are a lot of like also really beautiful nuanced pieces in the graphic. So obviously the icons of the whales on the left side, but also um there's this little tiny, two tiny icons of the whales in the blue part of the graphic in the ocean. So it's like this actual, just little additional piece there um that the the water goes from a light blue to a darker blue as we get deeper into the ocean, which which makes sense.
Speaker: And then sort of tracking across these three graphs on the right side of the page to get from the lunge feeding to the position of the fin to the time and just really all pieced together. And if you're looking on YouTube, um Jonathan Coram was very... ah nice enough to send me some a few things and he actually is gonna uh you're gonna hear from him just a second uh send me some of the academic papers the first one big gulps require high drag for fin whale lunge feeding by goldboggen piensen and shadwick and as i scroll through here uh you can actually see a very that graphic with those icons um not as beautiful as the graphic that jonathan puts together but the the icons are themselves are lovely um and then a second paper that also kinematics of foraging dives and lunge feeding and fin whales um that has some photographs and how they actually measured it and all the math in here. um And also on page um page seven of the journal,
Speaker: is essentially the graphic that Jonathan creates in his version. But what I thought was really interesting, and this is, I think always an interesting task, that when you see a graphic that's based on scientific literature, to go back to that paper, to that literature, and see what the graphics look like there, and how a professional data visualization communicator, data journalist actually thinks about it. But in the academic version,
Speaker: The depth graphic that's very tall in the New York Times version is cut in half because they basically put a break because there's there's there's nothing happening between 30 meters and 230 meters except for the whale continuing to dive. But by cutting that segment out, you lose the perspective of depth. And so I think that's like one of the great pieces of this um of this piece is pulling all these different aspects together in the depth.
Speaker: So with all that being said and why I like this piece, Jonathan was nice enough to send over a video about his experience making this graphic. So I'm gonna turn it over to him and I'll be back to wrap us up.
Speaker: at John, it's Jonathan Coram. I'm pulling up the lunch feeding files now. The newspaper slug for this story was gulp. So when I look at the files, I just see gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp gulp all the way down.
Speaker: But that's actually a pretty good summary of the story because it's about whales feeding and especially whales feeding at depth. And so the this was for a story by Carl Zimmer, and it was based on, it looks like a paper that came out a month or so before, where the researchers went out and basically stuck devices on the backs of fin whales with effectively a suction cup.
Speaker: and then tracked their movements as they went and made these deep these deep dives to around 800 feet. and I remember looking at this paper, trying to recreate kind of what I did at the time, but I would have kind of gone through and read the paper first.
Speaker: The paper was, Big gulps require high drag for fin whale lunge feeding. so yeah a pretty pretty technical summary here and as i was flipping through i definitely remember noticing that the graphics that they came that they kind of put in the paper were quite abstract there's a lot of mathematical formula and the i'm looking at like angle of the mouth basically over time. it's Everything seems seems like quite abstract and and not really, although it's it'slthough representing the physical reality, it's not actually showing the physical reality. So I you know i think by the time I got down to the middle the paper, I was happy to see these really nice illustrations of of five stages of the fin whale's mouth and of opening and then shutting, which I ended up using the paper because they were just very well done.
Speaker: but they're kind of tacked onto or tacked around a very heavily loaded diagram, a line chart, but it's showing at least four different types of data over one over one time sequence of 20 seconds. So it just was quite complicated. So think at this point, by the time I finished with this paper, I realized that I had these illustrations that kind of showed what was happening to the whale's mouth.
Speaker: But didn't quite seem like that was enough. The the other charts here, just it seemed like you really had to picture too much in your head to figure out what what was going on, which I'm sure is perfect if you're whale scientist, but for our readers, it just seemed a little bit of a stretch.
Speaker: So I think what I ended up doing was I went and track down other papers from the same author. This is jeff sorry Jeremy Goldbogen and others, just to see what else had come out of this research or previous research.
Speaker: And I think the big moment where I realized like this was going to be a really fun graphic was when I found the second paper from a year or so before. And that one was called Kinematics of Foraging Dives and Lunge Feeding in Finn Whales.
Speaker: This is from the Journal of Experimental Biology, which I was so happy about this paper that I ended up, I think I still actually do subscribe to that journal's alerts in the hopes that they'll send another gem like this one.
Speaker: And so this one was pretty wonderful. It actually shows pictures of the suction cup devices. It shows them attached to the whale. I was excited about that and ended up not using them in the graphic because few pages later, once we get through some of the other abstract charts, there's a depth chart. I've mentioned this moment in several of my talks because it was just seeing this little this little kind of squiggle of a whale up at the zero line. make we' We're measuring depth, so the zero is the top.
Speaker: and Then it makes this dive and this is it the whale being tracked. And once it gets down to, it looks like 250 meters or around 800 feet, it makes these little feeding lunges as it's kind of gulping up krill, I assume. Yes, krill. And then it it that takes a lot of energy. That takes a lot of kind of have essentially energy, oxygen. And so after four or five of these, it has to return to the surface and come back. But to save space, the designer of the chart really cut out the whole middle section. So you see the whale start to descend, and then there's a big gap in the depth chart, and then you see the bottom of those kind of the lunge feeding when it's at depth and it's found something to eat. And this, I think when I saw that, I was just...
Speaker: blown away because that gives me the exact track of a whale in like a two-dimensional cross view of the whale swimming down and coming back up. and Then they link this chart to other things like the the whale's the tail pattern, like how much it was exerting its its tail to to swim.
Speaker: the roll and the pitch of the of the body, which I didn't really use. It gets a little complex. and Then the speed of the animal as it's moving through the water. and so You see it kind of accelerate to eat something and then as it opens its mouth to engulf these krill, it basically engulfs like a busload full of water. And then grinds to a halt. And then it has to use its tail again to speed up and do it again. And this takes a lot of energy, which is why it seems like it comes back up within about eight minutes.
Speaker: um But yeah, mean seeing I think seeing this chart was one of the probably the highlights of my my early times career. I think this is 2007. So I'd been there maybe about two and a half years.
Speaker: And I realized that this piece was going to come together and that really it was going to be more like a collage, that the data was here, kind of scattered across these two papers in a format that is more complex than I need, more complex than a general reader needs, but it was all here. and so Now at this point, it was just a matter of tying it together.
Speaker: So I emailed the author and I asked for that missing data. It looked like a straight line down. But if you've seen some of my talk slides, I do love this reveal where you kind of, here's the original chart where you just see the top and the bottom and then you show the next slide and it's basically the entire, the depth of just gives you some sense of how far this whale actually diving to find food.
Speaker: and so After that, looking at the files, it looks like this came together over about a dozen iterations. and Just looking through them, it looks like the chart came together, the dive chart that was kind of vertically linked to the the speed and the fluking pattern, the the the tail movement.
Speaker: It looks like that came together fairly quickly. And then the hard part was figuring out where to put the whales, where to put the whale illustrations. And this is for print, right? So I had to negotiate space.
Speaker: had to figure out, is this going to be two graphics? I kind of, you know, scattered in the story is going to be one. um But it looks like within a couple sessions, I figured out the current order of the whales kind of stacked on the left and then the dive chart on the right.
Speaker: And from there, you know I usually save the writing to the very end. So this looks like the graphic is going to slowly come together. And then the format gets locked in. And then I start to just write and annotate the pieces.
Speaker: And it looks like it wasn't until... When did this come up? No, okay, actually, it looks like the second day that I worked in this, I realized that we could actually put a whale at scale riding this tracking chart up and down through the ocean.
Speaker: And that, I think, was one of the just great details where, you know, it just felt like it just felt like I'd been given the pieces. And...
Speaker: and it it just was kind of so clearly calling out to be put together in a way that respected the content, respected the effort that it took to get this data and to give it space. I mean i understand why the scientists condensed the chart down, right because they have a lot of words, right they have limited space in the journal, they have other charts showing very technical details that they want to include. and so Showing a whale kind of swimming up and down is not the key part of the study.
Speaker: But for a reader, And for someone who's just flipping through the paper, that seemed like I wanted to show that. I wanted to give it give it the space that it needed. And I wanted to show that whale kind of writing it up and down to represent what actually happened good in nature, as opposed to multiple layers of abstraction beyond that.
Speaker: So i think I've stopped talking about this graphic and in recent talks just because I felt like I was talking about it too much. But it was, think early on in my time, at my kind of career at the times, it did feel like it gelled in a way that, and it gelled, I guess, faster or just in a shorter amount of time with a little bit less work than some of the other later later projects where you know Things do come together, but often you're fighting, often you're sketching in different directions, often you're you know really pouring through the data trying to find out you know how am I to explain this. and This one, it felt like the pieces were there, they just had to be recognized and pulled together.
Speaker: Yeah, it's been a while since I looked at it. It is interesting, you know this is for print only. This is two thousand December 2007, so this would have been, what, six months after the iPhone was developed. So there was no mobile version. If there was a web version, which there probably was, it would have really just been a screenshot.
Speaker: So I never had the opportunity to to make this into a mobile graphic, but I think that would be a lot of fun. And some of my later graphics, which I don't have up now, but some of the graphics that I've done have kind of made little references to this to this piece about about depths and things happening over time in the ocean. And so it is a kind of an Easter egg piece and in some small way that I used over the next 18 years or so of my career at the Times.
Speaker: So thanks very much for interested in it. It's fun to come back and and look at some of these pieces I even have a German version that was translated in 2020 for Polar News.
Speaker: um But, yeah, thank you so much and take care. Thanks, Jonathan. Appreciate you sending that over. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Again, one of my favorite graphs, early infographic, at least in in my experience, thinking about how to tell stories with data in this graphic in this static graphic format. But also, I think importantly for me, seeing how academic work can be translated to more accessible work for a broader audience, not just about who reads books,
Speaker: I'm not sure what this study is, oceanography, or some study of whales, which I'm sure has its own ology name, um but seeing how ah if we think carefully about who we're trying to communicate with, we can take that really technical academic content and turn it into something that more people can understand, view, and and in this case, I think something that is that is really quite a beautiful graphic itself.
Speaker: So I hope you enjoyed this episode of My Favorite Graphs. I'll be back in a couple weeks with another one. In the meantime, I hope you have a great November. And like always, this has been the PolicyViz Podcast.
Speaker: Thanks so much for listening.
