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Episode #35: Irene Ros
136 Plays9 years ago
If you haven’t heard, OpenVisConf 2016 is right around the corner (April 25-26 in Bostom). In its 4th year, OpenVis Conf is a two-day, single track conference centered around the practice of visualizing data on the web. The conference features...
The post Episode #35: Irene Ros appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
MICA's Online Graduate Program
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by the Maryland Institute College of Art. MICA's online graduate program in information visualization trains designers and analysts to translate data into compelling visual narratives. Learn more about it and MICA's other professional graduate programs at a happy hour and networking session that convene in Tyson's Corner, Northern Virginia on March 16. For more information, go to mica.edu slash MPSInViz.
Introducing Irene Ross
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I'm very excited this week because coming up at the end of April is the Open Vis Conf in Boston hosted by Boku. And the main organizer of that conference is Irene Ross, who is joining me today on the show. Irene, how you doing?
00:00:56
Speaker
And well, thanks so much for having me here. Thanks for thanks for coming on.
Irene's Role at Boku
00:01:00
Speaker
I'm really excited for the conference. This will be the fourth year. Yes. And in the aquarium and Boston, which will be super fun. I'm assuming we all get to swim with the sharks.
00:01:13
Speaker
I haven't looked into it, but I know the penguins have been working on some, you know, interactive dashboards, aquarium data, you know, so it's all pretty good. And we're all going to be nervous if lunch comes in at seafood.
00:01:29
Speaker
That's a really good point and I will make sure that won't be the case. So I'm excited for the conference but before we sort of dive into what it takes to put on a conference like that and who you have sort of lined up to speak, why don't we start by talking about a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Boku and what Boku does.
00:01:48
Speaker
Sure. So I'm the director of data visualization at Boku, and we are an open web technology company. And the way we look at that is we are very committed to the open web as the platform of the future. We want to make sure that the web is something that is accessible to both engineers, but consumers all around the world. And so we champion open technologies to our clients and our communities.
00:02:16
Speaker
and try to create tools where we see a need and make sure that we can be stewards of the open web. A lot of that happens through consulting. We're primarily a consulting company and folks come to us and say, I have this need, I need to build this tool and we help them really do that using open source technologies and open stacks. It's been amazing to really watch that argument become a lot easier to make just in the four and a half years I've been there.
00:02:45
Speaker
I'd say these days it's really not even an argument folks kind of come to us and they really understand the value so I've been really thrilled that we know we get that type of audience and that type of work.
Boku's Open Source Projects
00:02:56
Speaker
And when the clients come to you guys and say we want to build a new tool or a new toolkit are they primarily interested in things that are going to be public?
00:03:05
Speaker
that are built on open web infrastructure and tools, or are they also interested in trying to improve the way they work internally using open source technologies?
00:03:15
Speaker
I would say it's really all over the spectrum. We've seen any and all types of projects, anything from we want to build an open source library to make it easier for people to work with video to we're building the next version of JavaScript and we want to make sure we have full test coverage to we're building an internal tool to manage our infrastructure of microservices.
00:03:41
Speaker
It's quite varied and a lot of the times, you know, we're happy to work on any front like that in part because once you get folks working with an open stack, they see how much easier it is. And so they start applying that more and more and more to other tools and other developments in their company. And so
00:03:58
Speaker
While we love having our work be public and contribute to the public space, it's actually okay with us if that doesn't happen because nonetheless, we've still managed to come to this big organization that's been working on closed-source software with closed-source software and say, here, we're going to help your team move to this other production way. Most of the time, that's a pretty big change for them and they really stick with it, which is very cool.
00:04:24
Speaker
Do most companies, even if they're really interested in improving how they work internally, are they open to adding some of the additions or improvements that they've made to open source technologies, pushing that back out? Maybe not as part of the entire internal tool because that may have some proprietary information that they're holding. But are they usually willing to push out parts of the open source software or technologies that they've built so that others can use them as well?
Client Collaboration in Open Source
00:04:48
Speaker
Absolutely. And that's been actually one of the more exciting parts about the way that we structure our contracts as well in that we have some language in our service agreement that basically says, you know, if we produce open source, worthy code that does not interfere with any of your proprietary IP or anything, then we reserve the right to open source that.
00:05:10
Speaker
And in a lot of cases, our clients are really thrilled about that because what that means is other folks may come and get benefit from their software that does wonders for them. They might get help supporting this. Their engineers are happier because they get to be a part of the open web and not just kind of work in this closed environment. And so it's something that we generally come to agreement on before we work with anybody.
00:05:34
Speaker
And what's the interplay or the overlap between the open source technologies and platforms and open data? So I feel like a lot of people are like, oh, open data. I know what that is. Open source tools and programs is maybe for a lot of a little more distant. But open data seems to like everybody knows what that is. So how do the two sort of fit together and the tools that you work with and the clients that you work with?
00:05:55
Speaker
Sure. There have been a couple of different ways in which I think that's touched on in our work. One is that we help a lot of our clients design the APIs that they are using in their systems. And so we're really shifting a lot of folks from
00:06:10
Speaker
kind of server side, arbitrary rendering to really following through with the REST API spec. Folks in our team have been working on the JSON API spec as well over time. So that's something that we've been kind of pushing more as a community. But really getting folks to think a lot about separating their data layer and their front end in a way that is kind of more sustainable and allows for future growth of their platform. So I'd say that's one big way.
00:06:38
Speaker
And then we as a team and the DataVis team have been really excited about sharing more of our analysis work and that kind of touches I think more on the actual usage of data more than anything but we have a variety of expertise in the team in terms of both the tools that we use to do our analysis and the types of analysis that we're
00:06:56
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capable of. And I'd say that that's just something that we're really excited to share more about. So, you know, for example, in the Stereotropes project, we, you know, released our entire repo, our whole pipeline, the tools that we use and the methods that we use to chain them all together. And that's something that we're pretty committed to doing on all of the projects that we're releasing.
Stereotropes Project Overview
00:07:18
Speaker
So can you talk a little bit for folks who aren't familiar, can you talk a little bit about the stereotypes project that came out about a year ago, a little over a year ago? Yeah, I'd say it was sometime around maybe April or May last year. Yeah, I'd be happy to. So last year, we had a bit of time to work together as a team and really come up with a project that we're passionate about.
00:07:36
Speaker
And we became aware of this community called TV Tropes, which is really an amazing group of people who are very passionate about film and TV. And they do a really great job of recording tropes that they see appear in any of those mediums. And by tropes, I mean things that are, we know sometimes as stereotypes, but honestly can be any kinds of patterns that characters exhibit over time. Things like damsel in distress, for example, is a pretty common trope.
00:08:05
Speaker
And so we found this great data sets and in that data set there were two sub-collections of tropes that were primarily associated with female characters and one primarily with male characters. And so that was really great because we now had this subset of tropes within these
00:08:21
Speaker
two binary and gender categories. What we did was apply some pretty fun text analysis techniques to that data, which was quite large, to look at specifically the adjectives that are being used to describe these characters. The folks on TV Tropes do an amazing job really writing these beautiful narratives about the types of characters they encounter.
00:08:41
Speaker
We had a very rich dataset. And then we can really extrapolate from that and aggregate to look at the way that we represent the two genders in film and media and other media. And so that was really fun because, you know, we got to have a lot of really interesting conversations because of the tool around the ways that we represent all kinds of different communities, you know, anything from
00:09:02
Speaker
how we represent women, how we represent people of different races. And it was because we really tried to be very impartial in our analysis. I was really nervous that we were going to get a little bit attacked for taking on a subject that was this challenging, but really we did not get any negative feedback. I think folks were excited just to see our analysis and we also released it into the wild so folks could really go and see what we did.
00:09:27
Speaker
And so that was really exciting. We explored some new visualization techniques that were pretty fun on our trope pages and combined some other techniques together. A lot of folks said that it's really easy to get lost in the site. We've had someone who spent six hours on it one day. I don't know who that person is, but I hope you just email me one day. I'll get to thank them for their time.
00:09:49
Speaker
So yeah, it was really exciting and I was really thrilled about the response that we've had. We got some award nominations and we were so honored to be among some really, really amazing other projects. So I hope that it's something that it was a great learning experience for us. It really helped us solidify our interests and our skills and working with text as a type of data. But also, you know, I hope it generated a lot of good conversations in our community.
00:10:16
Speaker
Great. So I want to talk about texts a little bit, but in the context of the OpenVizConf, which is coming up. So why don't we talk about OpenVizConf and then I know you're doing a text this workshop the day before maybe. So can we first start by talking about OpenVizConf
Organizing Open Viz Conf
00:10:32
Speaker
itself? And this is the fourth year. Can you talk a little bit about what it sort of takes to put on a conference like this? And how tired are you right now?
00:10:40
Speaker
Um, sure. Well, it definitely takes a village and I'm really, I could never do this by myself. So I'm honored to be sometimes the face of it in part because I'm the emcee, but it takes really a ton of folks, both on the moku end and also in our program committee who help us make some incredibly hard decisions.
00:10:57
Speaker
It gets much easier to do it every year in some ways in that we are more aware of the kinds of logistical things we need to look out for. We've been switching venues as we've grown. Every year, we've had about 100 more people that come to the conference and still selling out. So we've grown the venue again this year. As you mentioned, it'll be in the aquarium, which is pretty amazing. We'll be in the IMAX theater. My mind is blown that how great that'll probably be.
00:11:21
Speaker
But, you know, I think the hardest part every year, of course, is the program. We take so much time and effort to make sure that our program is right. And choosing the final lineup is the hardest thing I have to do every year by far because there are so many great talks that get submitted. In the end of the day, we really can only have so many. And so that means that a lot of talks don't make it. And a lot of times, those are our friends and people who we respect a lot.
00:11:47
Speaker
And we've never wanted to expand to be a multi-track conference because we don't want that fear of missing out to be an active play for anybody. And we haven't expanded it to another day. It is kind of a time commitment for folks. So we've kept it at two, but it does kind of limit how many talks we can have. And we always really packed the schedule for better or worse.
00:12:08
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you know, the way that we do the schedule in the end, you know, I don't know if we share that with other conferences, but we spend a lot of time making sure that there's kind of an underlying narrative between all of our talks. And I sometimes compare that to trying to choreograph an entire dance out of individual moves, where the individual moves will be beautiful, but they have to work
00:12:27
Speaker
kind of in synchrony. And so I'm pretty excited about some of the threads that we have going this year. You know, we're bringing a lot of things around machine learning to the conference. That's going to be really exciting. We're seeing some interesting work happening in that, you know, in neural networks and deep learning, things like that. And of course, we're bringing a really amazing lineup from our journalism friends, anything from Mona, who's coming to Kennedy Elliott and
00:12:51
Speaker
We're even going to explore more adventurous topics like virtual reality and what that might hold for us in the future. I think that's going to be a really exploratory talk. We're bringing a little bit more data science to the conference this year, so Amelia is going to come and talk to us about making sure we capture the right patterns in data, the patterns we see, our actual patterns in the data, and obviously always on the cutting edge of technology where we can.
00:13:17
Speaker
We'll have Patrice here come and talk about WebGL shaders and some of the cool work that he's doing with MapZen. So we're covering such a breadth of topics. We really want to make sure that folks come out feeling like they have this broad sense of things are happening. They're inspired to go do something, but they also feel empowered to actually go ahead and do it. So there's very much a learning focus and a teaching spirit in the conference. So I'm pretty happy that we can kind of maintain that.
00:13:46
Speaker
And how important is it for you when you are going through the applications to find not just good topics, but also good speakers? I mean, I'll say it's certainly something that we look out for. I'll say primarily the two things we keep an eye out on are we want to make sure the folks that we bring are members of our community that they are as dedicated as we are to teaching that they haven't, you know, broken any
00:14:15
Speaker
Social conduct rules there are certain types of people that we don't want at the conference We don't want people who are incredibly negative for example because we want to learn from each other We want to be able to feedback and critique each other's work, but in a way that is you know positive for example
00:14:30
Speaker
Um, so that's one thing to look out for. And of course, you know, we always try to make sure that we have a diverse lineup of folks, um, and diverse is something that can be interpreted in a thousand different ways. We have a very diverse team about who, and, you know, we think really hard about, you know, gender and race and LGBTQ. And so I always try to, it's, it's hard to balance all of those things. And of course, um, the quality of the program, you know, stands strong across all of these different things.
00:14:58
Speaker
When it comes to the site of the conference, you know, this is the fourth year, it's the fourth different venue. How important is it to try to find like, let's call it a cool venue, right? You mentioned that it's going to be in the IMAX this year. The first year was in the Science Museum in Boston. That was a really cool venue. So how important is the actual venue to sort of maintain the excitement in the conference and get people talking and be comfortable, but, you know, be excited?
00:15:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, absolutely, it adds a lot of texture to the conversation we can have the kind of materials that we can produce around the conference. You know, last year, for example, we were in this beautiful theater, it was gorgeous, and there was an actual play happening around our
00:15:38
Speaker
our conference and so there's this beautiful stage set up that was kind of very ocean themed, it was gorgeous and our talks happened on it. We didn't plan for it so it adds an element of uncertainty but more than anything I think it lets us be playful and I really enjoy that we've been able to switch things around. I think it certainly complicates things for us a little bit logistically but it's kind of been getting bigger and we want to make sure that all the folks that want to come are able to
00:16:07
Speaker
And, you know, every single venue we've had was great. I wish we, you know, the Museum of Science was very special to me because it was the first and they were so supportive and helpful in pulling the first open viscoms together that they have a very special place in my heart. So I really.
00:16:22
Speaker
I wish they could accommodate all 400 of us, but I do hope that we get to go back there. If you're in town, Frohan is, go visit them there. It was a great venue and I'm excited for the aquarium as well. You mentioned trying to pack as many really good speakers and topics as you can into the two days. I'm also curious how you try to balance the single track of listening to talks, but also letting people have enough time to
00:16:51
Speaker
network and talk and have conversation in between the talks or at the lunch. So how do you sort of balance the we're going to sit down and have so many hours of presentations versus we're going to let you have this much time to sort of just hang out and talk.
00:17:05
Speaker
Sure. It's a really tough balance because I know a lot of people come to the conference precisely to do that. So, you know, we keep extending our lunchtime. So we extended again this year, it's an hour and a half this time, which is great. And we have a couple of other breaks throughout the day. And I think the best part really to support some of that networking is going to be in our party. So I'm pretty excited. We haven't shared this.
00:17:29
Speaker
on the site yet but we are going to have a party on the first day of the conference and it's going to be among our ocean friends at the aquarium so you know stay tuned for more info about that obviously but i'm pretty thrilled to have that kind of space and i do think that a lot of folks really bond during that conference party in the first day
00:17:48
Speaker
We see a lot of tired but happy folks on day two. There's a lot of things happening usually after the conference as well, kind of more unofficially, but people stick around for extra days. They do some hack days or they just hang out in Boston together. I've heard of all kinds of different trips being planned around OpenViz Zone. I'm pretty thrilled that our community is getting friendships like that together.
Open Viz Conf Pre-Conference Workshops
00:18:12
Speaker
Before we close out, let me just ask about the pre-conference workshop. I know you're doing one on Textviz. What else is going on? How do you end up pulling that together? Yeah, absolutely. Workshops is something we've been asked to do several times now and we just haven't had the bandwidth and then this year we finally could, which is really thrilling. We have three workshops that we're running. The first is this text analysis slash visualization workshop and it's a full-day workshop with Jim and Yannick, who are part of the team at Boku.
00:18:41
Speaker
And they're so incredibly knowledgeable and amazing at both fronts. And we're also going to draw from some work that we're doing with Lynn Turney to bring some of these resources to the public, which I'm really thrilled about. And so that's an all-day workshop. And kind of in parallel to that, there are two additional workshops happening. The first is an introduction to D3 with Katam, who's another member of our team. And that's really to get folks who've
00:19:04
Speaker
you know, heard about D3, maybe played around with it a little bit right up to speed. We'll cover kind of the trickiest parts in this short timeframe. And then the third one is actually going to be with Andy Woodruff, who's our Boston resident map expert. And he's going to give an introduction to mapping with open tools and data. I'm really thrilled because he always produces such amazing resources. So I'm really honored that he was able to join us.
00:19:30
Speaker
That's great. Yeah, I think they're going to be really fun workshops and they're kind of an experiment for us. We did a survey on Twitter asking folks what they wanted to learn about and these were our sort of top three, so we put them together. Great, great. Well, this sounds great. I'm looking forward to it. It is April 25th and 26th in Boston. You can register for the conference at openvizconf.com if you're interested in attending. And there are some tickets left, right?
00:19:58
Speaker
Yes, they're going faster than I expected, but we still have a couple left. That's great. That's great. Well, Irene, thanks so much for being on the show. I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks in Boston. Yes, thank you so much for having me, and thanks for doing this podcast. It's such a great asset to our community. Oh, thanks. And thanks, everyone, for listening to the show. If you have comments or questions or suggestions or other pointed things to say about the show, please do let me know on Twitter or on the site. And until next time, this has been the Policy of This Podcast.
00:20:38
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by the Maryland Institute College of Art. MICA's online graduate program in information visualization trains designers and analysts to translate data into compelling visual narratives. Learn more about it and MICA's other professional graduate programs at a happy hour and networking session at Convene in Tyson's Corner, Northern Virginia on March 16. For more information, go to mica.edu slash mpsinvis.