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Episode #137: Information+ Conference
141 Plays6 years ago
I spent the weekend-before-last in Potsdam, Germany attending the Information Plus Conference. In its second iteration (the first was in Vancouver in 2016), Info+ brings together designers, academics, and practitioners to discuss the current state of data visualization work and...
The post Episode #137: Information+ Conference appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Focus
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I am your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, I'm going to sit down and chat with a couple of people about the Information Plus Conference that was held recently in Potsdam, Germany. I spent a couple of days at the conference plus a day just before the pre-conference workshop with a couple of folks from the pudding who do some great work with data and stories and interactive visualizations.
00:00:38
Speaker
A few notes before we get into this week's episode first.
New Podcast Features
00:00:43
Speaker
I'm now going to be publishing transcriptions of each episode. The transcriptions will show up probably a few days after the episode initially posts. So if you're interested in having the full text, if you're interested in being able to quote it or cite it, please make sure you come back to the site later each week.
Recommended Resources and Support
00:01:01
Speaker
I'll have the transcription up at the bottom of the show notes for each episode.
00:01:06
Speaker
Second thing is that I've pulled together a list of my favorite data visualization books, presentation books, presentation tools, biographies, brain books, a lot of my favorite stuff on my new Amazon affiliates page. There's a link on the show notes, so if you're interested in checking out what some of my favorite books are and things that I use to give presentations, you can go over to Amazon and check those out.
00:01:31
Speaker
And finally, I have launched a Patreon page to help support the show. As you know, the show does not have ads. I don't go out and try to seek funding from corporate sponsors, so there are no ads on the show. But if you are interested in helping support the show, that would be great. Just a few bucks here or there would help me out to help me pay for the audio editing.
00:01:56
Speaker
pay for the transcription services, pay for the good audio materials and products that I need to make the show great, I would really appreciate it. There's a link to the Patreon page on the show notes, so if you can go over there, drop a couple bucks would really help support the show.
00:02:17
Speaker
Lots of different levels that you can donate to. So please do check out the Patreon page.
Conference Highlights and Speaker Insights
00:02:24
Speaker
So on this week's show, I sat down with John Byrne-Murdock from the Financial Times, Andy Kirk from Visualizing Data, and Anda Vedeker from NZZ in the Netherlands to talk about the Information Plus Conference.
00:02:38
Speaker
Just one note before you get to the show, we sat down, the four of us sat down outside the conference during the last break before the final three talks. And the final three talks were really tremendous talks, great topics to try to bring a lot of the topics together that were discussed over the course of the two days.
00:02:58
Speaker
and spend a little bit of time talking about, those speakers spent a little bit of time talking about data ethics, talking about diversity in the field, talking about some sort of bigger think type topics. So the conversation you're about to hear took place before those last three sessions, but I would really recommend that you take a look at the videos for those three sessions when they become available on the conference website, as well as a lot of the other talks that the four of us talk about.
00:03:27
Speaker
in the episode you are about to listen to. So, without further ado, here is this week's Policyviz podcast episode with myself, John Bird-Murdock, Andy Kirk, and Anna Vidaker sitting outside at the Information Plus conference.
00:03:49
Speaker
Alright Elle, well thanks for sitting outside on a lovely fall German day. It's beautiful. How about this, why don't we, quick, quick introductions so everybody knows who they're listening to and then we can talk about information plus. Okay. Alright.
00:04:09
Speaker
I jump and made up Financial Times. Nice. All right. So
Conference Talk Reflections
00:04:13
Speaker
we got our spot. For you. And me, John. With the podcast. And I'm putting in quotes. Now it's been more nicely put in quotes this week. All right. So two days, information plus. How many talks have we seen? Like 26, 27, something like that. Do you want to give me numbers? Yeah. There's been at least about 25 maybe.
00:04:39
Speaker
Okay, well, let's set the stage, I guess, a little bit. So we're here in Potsdam, Germany. We are at a university, which the name I cannot pronounce. And you want to pronounce it? There you go. That's the one. And this is the second info plus. This is the second info plus. So I went to the Vancouver one, inaugural in Vancouver two years ago.
00:05:00
Speaker
I really enjoyed it actually. I was out there anyway, but it was nice to get to. I think for me, what interests me in being here is about the mixture of people and backgrounds. It's not an academic conference. It's not a creative coders conference. It's not a bar chart conference. It's a nice mixture. Just trying to bring all those different skills together. Yeah, both in terms of talkers and participants. Right. Do we want to talk about favorite talks?
00:05:28
Speaker
Do you have a favorite talk? Before we're even done yet. Well, no, we're not even done yet. That's true. So we've got this. There are three talks left. Is that right? So where it's on the afternoon, but there's three talks left. So we're going to, we're going to the sample selected, but favorite talks so far. Favorite talks so far. Yeah.
00:05:45
Speaker
And let me just set the stage a little bit. So the talks were a mix of 20, 25-minute keynotes, some 15-minute talks, and then a bunch of 5-minute lightning talks that, I will say this for the organizers, they were really good at keeping people on time. Yeah. There was no... True what they say about the Germans. Yeah, it's run very smoothly. And I like that format, because even in 20 minutes, the longer talks,
00:06:10
Speaker
Even if you're not on board, it's over quite a bit. That's right, that's right. And, you know, it's hard even to reduce the talk to 20 minutes, let alone five minutes, which is remarkable, really, when you see the lighting talks, how quickly that goes. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I like most was the lighting talk format. Yeah. I think my favorite, you know, the lighting talks allow you to cover quirky things, little things that don't almost merit 20 minutes of discussion. But I really liked the piece by, it was Adina, it was
00:06:40
Speaker
the student at the University of Finland. That was just to talk about this idea that the premise was that the Finnish people are not wonderful in social occasions, like at bus stops they don't have that interaction and as a British person that's very much in line with that viewpoint. But the idea was that
00:07:04
Speaker
to facilitate the ice-breaking element of the conference they were running, visualising knowledge it was back in May this year. They developed these little radar devices that people self-rated against eight dimensions of its personality or interest.
00:07:21
Speaker
And then on your lanyard, you got a profile. Yeah, the graph of your survey results. And it was an icebreaker. So if you walk up to them, you're not just seeing their name, but you get a quick sense of, you know, are they totally into the same things as you are? Are they different? In which case, let's have a chat about what I don't know and what you don't know about me. And I thought it was a really nice idea. Then obviously, from a design point of view, it doubles up as a, you know, as a piece of branding for the event and some nice little animated things that sit in the background of the
00:07:49
Speaker
The other nice touch about that talk was where she put the images for all the conference attendees and highlighted the ones where people didn't answer questions. And then the few that were the maximum of each of those eight categories. And she didn't know whether people, they actually think that their strengths are all these things. They just said, yeah, it's a 10 for everything. So I really liked that one.
00:08:14
Speaker
And you have a favorite.
Impactful Talks and Themes
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think it was Jessica Balamis, to be honest. I think she's the one from Kentucky who does kind of more infographic work, but I focus on like a very like...
00:08:27
Speaker
the low economic colored group of where she grew up and where her family has roots in. And I think this is a use of data visualization and demographic design in its most valuable way. She also gave a fire talk. She really did, right? She had five minutes. She explained, I mean, I'm American, so maybe I have a little bit of a bias because I think Americans can give great emphatic presentations. And I think she did a wonderful job with that. And I also think
00:08:57
Speaker
Whereas some of the other talks were like, I am researching in this like echo chamber of me and my other researcher friends where we ask research questions to each other or the people who are amazing, high Twitter follower, visualization superstars are only talking to each other. She was like, look, here's where I'm coming from. This is what I'm doing. And this is the impact that it's having in a real social context.
00:09:21
Speaker
And that's the stuff that I think that we should be doing. And she showed up, fire talk, walked off stage. And it was like, that's what I wanted to do. She also had this whole part of like, she wasn't just making infographics about socially conscious issues. She was doing things in the community.
00:09:36
Speaker
and then taking the information from the community and then visualizing that. So it wasn't like, oh, I'm a designer interested in these topics. It's like actually volunteering and doing stuff on the ground. And she wasn't like, ah, here's a design thinking approach walking us through these like, this is where we talk to our users and we go observe them. And they're like, when you go to these conferences. Yeah. And she was like, no, I sat down.
00:09:59
Speaker
Place that's a restaurant that sells whiskey by the drink and then we like discussed with these people who are like hurting and feeling stuff And I yeah, she didn't need to observe anybody like a researcher. She's like, no, this is it Just like a really great way of holding power to account as well like we always I feel like as an industry sometimes we wonder what why we're not not you know, not why we're doing this but how we assessing the value of what we're doing and
00:10:25
Speaker
But she's talking about how you're able to go out and come face to face with local politicians and say, hey, we've actually got the facts here about how you failed on this policy or something. It's just a really great tool at that level, really immediate.
00:10:42
Speaker
on her phrase of like, I actually gave them weapons. I was like, I mean, we talk about data visualization as a tool to convince people or to make money or to convince our clients and all that kind of stuff. But she was like, no, I gave them weapons. Makes a lot of love from the tools. In 2018. Yeah, but not afraid to say it. And I think that's like super valuable because we all maybe think like, oh, we called it tools, but really we mean weapons sometimes.
00:11:06
Speaker
What job are you in? I thought Martin Wattamoke Fernando Viegas this morning was awesome. So that was looking at the use of data visualization in machine learning and AI to sort of identify patterns and to help in this difficult process of explaining how some of these models actually work. There were a couple of things I really liked about it.
00:11:36
Speaker
The AI is having increasingly big impacts on people's lives and a lot of people don't really know much about it. There's just this view that it's all very sci-fi and I think the more that people can actually appreciate what's going on here, including the dumb mistakes that some of these things make, like we saw examples where
00:11:54
Speaker
frog had been labeled as a cat or an owl was labeled as a dog or something and I think just demonstrating what's going on behind the scenes and how in some cases it's quite simple is just really valuable and it's clear that database can do that and then separately they use this example of
00:12:13
Speaker
A live data visualization, explorable piece, which demonstrates how biases can be reproduced by supposedly sort of objective meritocratic models. And again, I think it's a really, really important thing to demonstrate and to talk about as someone raising the question that it's not necessarily that AI is making things biased, but when you've got a highly unequal world.
00:12:35
Speaker
And you know that it's that unequal world that's been set down in data, then if you then rely on that data to do so I just yeah, I thought really awesome stuff And then yeah, I think they're really inspirational people who've done awesome work in this field for the years now So it's great to get a chance to see them and see them. All right any more highlights
00:13:02
Speaker
I think the one that I liked the most maybe was Valentina de Filippo's talk on Unmapped. She had this really cool
00:13:12
Speaker
I don't know, would you call it a project? It was a thing that she does. But we did it at dinner last night where she has people draw a map of the world. And what was interesting is she's done it in different places and where you put the center of the world is where you are, where you're from. Or in case in the UK, correct.
00:13:37
Speaker
And also the detail of your knowledge of your local shapes is pristine, but then you get to far from places that you've been to, it's like a blob. Right, it's like a blob. And then she talked about doing it in her workshops, which I think was a great exercise.
00:13:52
Speaker
I'm definitely trying. And what she talks about is the idea that people can add attributes to that of things like where have you been, where do you want to go, where do you have nice memories or things like that. It took you beyond just an illustration to something that you don't know. And it's your personal experience that you can then talk to people about, oh, I went to France for this thing. Oh, you went to France. Yeah. It'd be kind of cool to see all of those. You can kind of overlay them all where it's coming out too well. I've been there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put them all together at the end of the show.
00:14:19
Speaker
I thought Nadi's talk just before that as well was great. So she was looking behind, sort of showing behind the scenes of the project that she and Shirley worked on for the busting of homeless people across the US. But the thing I really liked about it, you know, it's a beautiful project, already won lots of awards, but it was seeing the messy stuff behind it, like the fuzzy matching she was doing on text because of different spellings of places. The rough
00:14:46
Speaker
GG plot charts, dozens of which she mocked up. And I think quite often in this community, we just see the end product and it can, you know, get people sort of positive syndrome. You think, oh, I'm never making anything that's that good. But when you realize that, you know, everyone's making crap stuff along the way to find the gems that you then, you know, making in D3 and whatever. And yeah, I just thought it was really nice because, you know, Nadi's
00:15:10
Speaker
work is all stunning. It was great to be like, oh no, I've made charts that look like that as well. I love Pedro's cruise. Was it this morning? That's right, the dendrogram. I love that project.
00:15:30
Speaker
Every consumer word, everything about it just ticks a box of interns. It's meaning and it's a astute choice. Do you want to talk about that? So for people who've seen our budget? Yeah, this is going to work really well on the audio.
00:15:47
Speaker
Three rings, dendrochronology. So the idea was that this concept was looking at I think about 150 years of immigration to the US. And he plotted this into these sort of rings, these kind of contour rings of decades.
00:16:03
Speaker
And then he used color and little mark indicators to, I think, represent 100 immigrants or something in a unit. And then the colors indicate the origin, whether it's from Europe or South America, from the Far East. There are seven different origins. And then this kind of animation builds up, but then you see the kind of collective ring and you see the bulges of where there's been dominant invigations from. You see the context of Americans who are
00:16:32
Speaker
the phrase he actually used, but just to give it some context. And then he split it out into 50 state categories. And so again, you see the size of the population, but it was so clear where the states are, it kind of comes from their neighboring continents effectively. Yeah. What was also neat about his way he set up the talk of
00:16:53
Speaker
you know, he was very clearly conscious of the visual imagery he was going for. And then at the end he has this little visual, this little video where the thing is animating and there's, you know, sounds of trees rustling in the background. I think above that, the general thing that I've most enjoyed about this, about this composition is just
00:17:14
Speaker
lots and lots of different people who have not heard speak before, and actually many of them have not come across or met before. Just having the chance to learn about new people, new projects, and give them the chance to have a voice because it's the format with the rapid nature of the talks, not just the lighting talks, but the longer formings you can fit in more speakers. And as somebody was on the panel for judging the proposals,
00:17:41
Speaker
I know there are hundreds of other pieces that would be fantastic and would have made it at any conference that didn't make it so the people who have made it have obviously got some really interesting things to say. Naturally, not everything strikes a chord with everyone. There are some things that I'm interested in learning about, but it's just not my immediate. Machine learning is not something I'm immediately involved in, but I'm glad to be given the chance to learn from someone who does. That manifested something of interest to learn.
00:18:09
Speaker
I mean, I think to that point, what I liked about the setup of the conference was that it started with these two or three talks about the history of information visualization.
Thematic Progression and Future of Visualization
00:18:18
Speaker
And then it felt kind of like it moved forward in time as well. Because we started with the history of information visualization. And then today, we started with machine learning, which is like the next where we're going. And then in between are all these various projects that are, some are static, some are using qualitative data, some are doing interactive stuff.
00:18:39
Speaker
Some people worry about mobile, I just, I like that having a whole, I assume it's gonna, it was a conscious decision, but like having this theme that sort of, this arc throughout the entire couple of days.
00:18:50
Speaker
And I thought that was a little bit different than other conferences that have been too. I really thought the audience was much more critical. And not just critical to each other. Like, oh my god, did you hear that? Terrible. No, it was like they raised their hand. They were like, I actually know something about this as well. I mean, there's always the one person who asked the question, but then preface it with their whole life's work, which is that's a different person. It's the person who's like, actually, and not even just have you thought about this, but more like a very
00:19:20
Speaker
Poignant question that makes the speaker and I mean the goal is like not to throw them off guard but also to be like hey But that's a real thought about ethics about this or have you really thought about? the effect of history and in terms of this question that you were asking and presenting like I thought that was cool usually people are just like good talk and Here's like here's a softball right but this but this one I was like I was like Sometimes well the data ethics question came up a lot
00:19:45
Speaker
I think it was after the machine learning one this morning, there was a question which was, it was a good sort of five minute question, but it wasn't one where it was five minutes explaining who that person was, it was just a sort of absolute complex. Just a sort of real razor sharp critique, the sort of itself drawing on
00:20:03
Speaker
work maybe of the woman who asked it or what she'd read and you could see from Martin and Fernando sort of grinning that they were like, this is an amazing question. It's like, yeah, that is classic.
00:20:18
Speaker
Very articulate response and then I mean they're hard things to navigate through a good Question that actually answers the question that's been raised. Yeah, I think everyone's dealt with us very well Yeah, maybe you know, maybe it's part of that having sort of a lot of academics among the attendees. Yeah Would there be just we don't need to go on for too long too much longer but
00:20:43
Speaker
Were there any topics you would have liked to have seen discussed? I mean, there was a lot here. There was a ton of content, so I'm not saying there's anything missing. But is there something of your personal interest that you would like to see someone get up there and talk about? I mean, I guess I have just a personal bugbear at the moment about how there's so much...
00:21:01
Speaker
attention on perception of precision reading of charts and my feeling is that most people outside of this practitioner and academic community don't read charts in that way. They're not really looking at them pixel by pixel. They're reading them as a unit.
00:21:20
Speaker
that makes an argument. Obviously, that's an equally black and white binary view. I don't think it's either or, but I'd be really interested to see some more debate about, are we sure that this is how people are actually evaluating our charts and more focus on making a memorable point overall?
00:21:40
Speaker
rather than like, you know, people reading into these bodies. Well, and I think Sarah Campbell's pictures yesterday about feeling numbers, I was kind of touched on that idea of the alternative in the spectrum, a just sense of quantitating numbers, but then also feel towards qualitative values that you can't reasonably put into a back chart. So yeah, I thought,
00:22:07
Speaker
There's a full spectrum of topics. I'm struggling to think of a thing that I feel is missing other than just a very selfish, myopic view of hearing about freelancers and how they do their jobs. But that's not
Ethics in Data Visualization
00:22:19
Speaker
fair. I feel like the data ethics thing, because there are so many questions, that's one that's...
00:22:23
Speaker
I would like to hear more about it. Yeah, it's actually been spoken about as a topic it's been more asked about. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And I think the answers of those questions have been really good. But it's clearly a topic that we need to consider, right? Absolutely, yeah. Good to think of it. I mean, if you think about a lot of the coverage posts, US election regarding trust, trust in data, trust in forecasting and stuff like that. And I guess that was elements of Martin and Fernando's talk about
00:22:48
Speaker
you know, trying to make this invisible thing that's happening behind the scenes a bit more visible, but equally, you know, it could be something a bit more explicit about the discussion about trust. Yeah. Yeah, trust institution. Yeah, yeah.
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think something used to be a frequent UX, UI conference goer, interaction design conference goer, which is a different world than a visualization conference goer. And I think something that gets covered there is a lot about testing. And it was maybe a subsequent subject of your point, which is if you design digital products, a lot of the thing that you have to spend the most time on is testing and getting to know your users. And I think that's something that sometimes
00:23:32
Speaker
Visualization misses because they just make something beautiful like tree rings or I don't know anything from National Geographic or Washington Post. There were people who blatantly said, don't really know my audience. I don't really know my audience. And you're like, you're a paper. What the hell?
00:23:47
Speaker
Or you were, yeah, you're like, you're building, I mean, this is why the conversation from Deutsche Bahn and Christian Leise, like this, the peak spotting, they know who their users are, they sat with their users, and that was like one of, again, UX talk, right? Like, this is about UX and visualization together, and everybody else is kind of like, yeah, well, it's something, we kind of just looked at it together. We looked at the number of clicks. Like, the rest of it is like, oh, we looked at clicks.
00:24:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's the easiest answer, right? Or I looked at it within my team, of my team of experts who are not user testing experts, right? So I'm like, where is this in visualization? How do we know if people can read this? What's this kind of ancestry thing? So if you come and join a major newspaper, newsroom like that.
00:24:29
Speaker
Maybe you're just going to inherit the style guide that's evolved over time that you just assume that this has been shaped around what is relevant, interesting and useful to people.
User Testing and Inspiration in Visualizations
00:24:38
Speaker
But you're right. That's a bad assumption to make. As I was working at newspapers, we know like, and as soon as you ask it, you find out like this, they're like, what? Yeah.
00:24:49
Speaker
Not really sure. And as the mediums change, it's also like a much more relevant question to ask. Because if you work at a traditional media organization, it's like, yeah, maybe we know our print audience, but we know our digital audience, right? There's so much to learn from these spaces together.
00:25:06
Speaker
I think, up until this point, I haven't heard a lot about user testing and visualization arena, which I wanted to hear about. One other thing that you just reminded me of was in that Deutsche Bahn talk, one thing I really liked was, you know, showing all this amazing, intricate, and powerful, and useful visualization, and then they showed the animation of the trains moving around Germany, and that was the point where the whole audience went, ooh!
00:25:26
Speaker
Right, like the token visualization. They were really honest and said, we made this as well, but we don't use it at all. There's no use. We didn't need it. Yeah. But it was, I just like that because it's, number one, it's just being honest and saying, but they described how it was an important thing to make because it got people to realize, you know, they really had something cool here. It was a thing to make the team more passionate and to convince them that the data was what they thought it was.
00:25:51
Speaker
It's worth thinking about, again, when we make visualisation, it's not always about, is this going to change the world? So Jessica Bellamy's stuff was all about how is this going to change things. Sometimes it's how is this going to inspire people, maybe just as part of a sort of side shoot off from a major project. Yeah. Which things are cool. Yeah, it was good stuff. That's great. Andy. Anna. John. John. John. Thanks for coming. That was fun. Thank you. Thank you.
00:26:23
Speaker
And thanks everybody for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Please be sure to come back in a couple of days. I'll have the transcription ready for you at the bottom of the show notes. Please also check out my Amazon affiliates page. And if you are able, please head over to my Patreon page and help support the show. So until next week, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.