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Episode #97: Tom Weatherburn and William Davis
174 Plays7 years ago
Working together, Tom Weatherburn and William Davis run the mapTO website a project where they make maps of Toronto and the surrounding areas. I found their project on rescaling the Toronto subway system to actual geography really intriguing, so I invited them to come...
The post Episode #97: Tom Weatherburn and William Davis appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Mapping Episode
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, we are going to talk about maps. We're going to talk about the good maps and the bad maps and maybe alternative ways to present and visualize geographic data. And to help me do so, I'm very excited to have Tom Weatherburn and William Davis here with me. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Hello. Hi, thanks for having us. How are you guys doing? Excellent.
00:00:37
Speaker
Great. I'm excited to talk about some of the cool work you've
Subway Maps and Geographic Reality
00:00:41
Speaker
done. The projects that caught my eye were these projects you did on subway maps, mapping them, no pun intended, mapping them to geographic reality. But before we dive into the work you've been doing, I think it'd be great if you could give listeners a little bio, talk about yourselves and how you guys got together. So Tom, why don't we start with you?
00:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So I'm a planner, an urban planner by trade. My background is in geography and I have a graduate degree in spatial analysis, so statistics and GIS. And all along throughout my life I've finished in art, so I've been doing graphic design for quite a while.
00:01:21
Speaker
I've been trying to weave those things together and I'm currently working for the government of Ontario as a planner and sort of working to bring data fizz, the design and sort of presenting evidence in easily digestible ways into the whole policy conversation around planning the region and that kind of thing. So that's sort of where I come from. That's my background. Great. William, what about you? Yeah. So I actually have a very similar background to Tom.
00:01:51
Speaker
We actually both have the same master degrees. I've gone a slightly different route. I started off working at the Toronto Star as a data analyst and I was in like math for their publication. And then I had this opportunity now at Dow Jones Media Group, which is representing all the other publications along with the Wall Street Journal.
00:02:15
Speaker
And we're just trying to now build the team to bring more data-driven and data visualization-led stories to the newsroom. Nice. Nice. That's great. And then how do you guys know each other? Because, Tom, you're in Toronto. Will, you're in New York City. So how do you guys know each other?
Origins of Collaboration: Tom and William
00:02:32
Speaker
So we actually went to the same high school. Will grew up in Toronto as well. We grew up in the same neighborhood. I have a younger brother who's friends with Will's crowd and some of his friends have older brothers that I hung out with. So we've known each other for quite a while and then I think it was after we were both finished school and looking to do
00:02:55
Speaker
extracurricular design cartography stuff that we connected over social media and through a mutual friend. And it's been a couple of years now. We've been working together on various projects under a couple of different conceptual sort of organizations. But right now we're we're mapTO.
00:03:18
Speaker
So, so you guys really bring together like Tom, it sounds like your, at least your background is a little more on the design side and will your backgrounds a little more on the date of his coding sites. You guys really bring sort of like those two, uh, elements together into one like neat little Canadian package. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. That's really cool. Yeah. He is a great eye and, uh, I've just been learning coding just by, you know, being thrown into it. I never learned it in school in the newsroom.
00:03:48
Speaker
But yeah, it's great. That's great. That's great. Well, I want to talk about a couple of the projects on the map TO site. The one I want to start with is the one that I saw in May, which is the newest TTC map on paper versus reality. And TTC is the Toronto Transit Commission. So this is the transit map of Toronto. And for those who haven't seen this project, what it essentially does is take the Toronto subway map as you would see it when you're on the train.
00:04:17
Speaker
And it essentially scales it to the geography because the two don't necessarily match up, which is the same thing in DC and in New York and in London, all these maps that sort of give us a different view of the geography. So can you guys talk about this project, where it, you know, the origin of it and, and, you know, what you're hoping to accomplish with it?
Utility vs Distortion in Map Design
00:04:39
Speaker
Yeah. Um, not actually found, uh, Bernie Jenny's map analyst and
00:04:47
Speaker
I was looking for ways to use it and I knew that the TTC, the Toronto Transit Commission, has just built a new line. So I knew they would be releasing a new map in the near future. And because I had a couple years back created a geographic version of their subway map just out of curiosity.
00:05:07
Speaker
I wanted to do the same thing, but with a bit more analysis behind it. So I actually had written an entire blog post about this map analyst tool. And during the day at work, I actually saw on Reddit, someone posted this geographic version to the diagram version of the Milan sub-WIS system.
00:05:28
Speaker
I just knew that I had, I just went home and I just like recreated it of Toronto because I knew that sort of wrapped the entire discussion together into one individual.
00:05:37
Speaker
Can we start the discussion about maps sort of, I want to get to talk about maps generally, but can we talk about the difference between a map that you use to go on the subway versus the geography? You know, is the, is the subway map distorting reality when we show up that way? Is it useful? I mean, how does this project help people understand sort of, I think what it does is help people understand the utility of maps in some ways. Yeah, I would definitely say so. I think.
00:06:04
Speaker
especially in Toronto, which, you know, has two major lines that extend really far north from downtown and also east and west. I think it misleads a lot of people into how long it'll take them to get uptown. So I think it's important that people actually just realize the actual geography of the city, especially if you're not used to traveling there. I'm hoping that just starts the discussion of, you know, what, what does the diagram, what does the diagram do? And is it useful?
00:06:34
Speaker
Is there anything you could do to potentially make that diagram at the moment? Tom, from the design eye, from the design perspective, how do you view the difference between a subway map that's, I might argue, more sort of utilitarian versus a geographic map which is accurately showing the geography. From a designer's eye, how do you look at those two?
00:07:01
Speaker
Well, I think I would look at it from two different perspectives. So from a designer's eye, looking at the subway map as a tool, I mean, really that's what it is. It's something that people need to read in order to navigate the system. And so a distorted map that's scaled down and cleaned up with just straight lines. When you're on that system, all you care about is getting from one stop to the next. So that's, I'd say, the most effective way to communicate the information that people need in that scenario.
00:07:30
Speaker
Then flipping it to the actual geographic map, I find that very interesting sort of more from my planner side of things. I think it's fascinating to see how spaced out those stops are in reality from a transit service perspective. I think it's really interesting to look at the density of stations in certain neighborhoods and throughout the downtown and then some of the more, we call them the inner suburbs, but the sort of
00:07:53
Speaker
more disparate areas of Toronto are far fewer stops and much bigger distances between stops and that kind of thing so I think that both maps serve a purpose one being for the user and the other being more sort of for the analyst looking at the looking at the system.
00:08:10
Speaker
Now, this map is visualizing data, but in a fairly specific way.
Beyond Maps: Geographic Visualization Techniques
00:08:15
Speaker
But you also have a number of projects on the MapTO website where you look at population densities in and around Toronto and other cities. Some of them are 2D choropleth maps. Some of them are 3D population density maps. So when you think about creating a visualization or visualizing geographic data,
00:08:34
Speaker
Is a map the first place you go or do you think about other visualization types and what are the trade-offs you think about when you're creating maps? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think
00:08:44
Speaker
For a lot of the stuff that I'm looking at, spatial distribution is really important. I've done a lot of the mapping that involves the census data. Government of Canada has a census every year and they just released new data for 2016 showing population counts and dwelling counts and population density. We've been having some fun with that.
00:09:09
Speaker
And as a planner i'm really interested in where change is happening or where certain things are happening so certainly that's my rationale for going to the map first but i think that maps become much more powerful when they're when they're paired up with
00:09:27
Speaker
with other visualization techniques. Everyone loves a good bar chart, but when you start to aggregate the data into neighborhoods or areas that people... The other great thing about maps is that they have all this contextual information embedded in them that people just...
00:09:44
Speaker
No, like if you're familiar with the city, you're looking at a map, you look at a neighborhood, and you may not have realized that the density was so high in that neighborhood, but you do have all this other contextual information that you're drawing on just from living in the city. So I think maps are really powerful when you draw on that kind of latent information that just exists in people's minds. But in terms of design, no, I think that
00:10:06
Speaker
depending on what you're trying to get across, you know, often people are just most interested in what are the most dense areas in the city or where has change occurred to the highest magnitude. And in those cases, I think it's much more effective to use like a bar chart or some other form of visualization that just shows ranking in a much clearer way. So again, I mean, it really depends on what the objective of the visualization is.
00:10:31
Speaker
A lot of the stuff we do is sort of exploratory, more so. I see it as facilitating access to the data in some ways, so I don't necessarily know what somebody has in mind when they, or what they're looking for when they look at the maps we make, but I like the idea of facilitating their access to that data.
00:10:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's right on. I think people are they like maps because they're familiar with, you know, they can find their their neighborhood or their state or their province on the map. But the same token, the maps may distort the data because the geographies don't scale. Or, you know, in Canada, for example, like doesn't some like huge proportion of people lives along the border. And so like a map of Canada may not be that particularly useful.
00:11:15
Speaker
The other thing I wanted to ask you guys about was the tools that you used to create this, because I think you're using WebGL to do the distortions, and I'd love to hear more about how you actually came up to create this. Yeah, so for the distortion maps, like I said, I used that map analyst tool, but then to create the animation between the geographic and diagram version, I used E3tweet. I created really smooth animation, but fortunately,
00:11:44
Speaker
I've done this, and I'm pretty sure the majority of all these transit map animations were made before this thing came out just recently called Flubber, which is made by Miller Belt. And that has made it super easy to transform SVG lines. So let me ask you this, because you said you had sort of recently, or within the last couple of years, learned D3. So did you find this a hard library to implement?
00:12:09
Speaker
No, not at all. The GitHub's really straightforward and you don't even actually have to use D3, use different coding libraries as well. Great. Can we talk about some of the other projects you guys have on the site? There's a lot of stuff on here. They are obviously dealing with geographic data, but do you have another one that's a favorite?
00:12:31
Speaker
Will, you wanted to talk about the Raptors map, yeah? Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Innovative Map Projects and Tools
00:12:35
Speaker
When I was in between moving from Toronto to New York and waiting for my visa to come through, I had just recently learned how to use the MPA shot API. And I was also trying to learn how to use Mapbox GL. So I decided to create like a 3D view of everything's harder shot throughout his history as a Raptor.
00:12:59
Speaker
And that was a lot of fun learning how to program with Mapbox.io, and I thought it came out looking great, proud of that project. What's interesting is that you're doing this 3D visualization of basketball shots. You're using a mapping tool. Do you think people forget that they can take tools and apply them to other visualization types? Yeah, I think that's one thing that I realized, and I think really just need an X and a Y.
00:13:23
Speaker
So if you think of any other data set that just has an X and a Y, you can apply any of these spatial tools to this. Now if you, you know, start a search, or they landed on a target, you know, those are all X and Y coordinates on a target, so that you can apply any sort of spatial analysis. Something like that. And that applies with, like, NBA shot charts as well.
00:13:46
Speaker
All sorts of sports now. Yeah. Cause you basically, you essentially have a latitude and longitude for all the shots or the hits or the tackles in football. It's a mapping task. Yeah. Tom, what about you? Do you have a favorite, you have a favorite project? Yeah. I mean, I have a few, I think that, a lot of the stuff that we've done with the census data is really interesting. It's.
00:14:08
Speaker
cool to show sort of change in housing units, change in population, the sort of dynamics of the city. But I think one of my, one of my favorite projects that we've done was a map of all the parks in Toronto within about a 500 meter buffer of the subway stations. So I think a theme that runs through a lot of our work is trying to sort of highlight these connections and help people
00:14:31
Speaker
you know, navigate the city in a fun or interesting way. And so we basically took the subway data, the same stuff that...
00:14:40
Speaker
William used for the distortion map. And then the city of Toronto is really great with open data. So they release a lot of stuff. And so they released the parks layer for the city. And so we just grabbed all the parks that were in walking distance to the subway station and then mapped that. It was a very simple map. It was just a quick GIS selection. And then we designed the map in Illustrator. No coding, nothing too fancy in terms of technology.
00:15:08
Speaker
But it was one of the maps that we made that actually circulated the most of our projects because I think it was so useful. People really like to see how they can access the park system in the city. And that was coupled, like I mentioned before, coupled with a bar chart showing the total park land per station, so the whole city.
00:15:34
Speaker
regardless of where you were in the city, you can see how easy it is to access a whole wealth of park banter at the city. So that's definitely one of my favorite projects.
00:15:44
Speaker
We also did some mapping for an organization called Friends of the Pan Am Path. It's an organization that a couple of years ago the Pan Am Games were in Toronto and they pulled together some funding to connect up all the trails in the city of Toronto and a big sort of path that connects various suburbs to downtown through the river valleys and across the trail system downtown. And so we were kind of their map guys on that and we produced a Pan Am Path map that
00:16:13
Speaker
Again, nothing complicated or fancy about the technology. A lot of it was just straight design work. But it's, I think, a very useful and interesting map of the city that sort of shows people how easy it is to access the ravine systems and the park systems and a lot of the sort of cultural facilities that are located across the city. So it's kind of a
00:16:34
Speaker
fun city building sort of thing. Yeah, that's really interesting. Let me ask you this.
Inspiration and Motivation for Map Projects
00:16:39
Speaker
You guys both have full time jobs. You're both from Toronto, but living in different places. And you've gotten together to create these visualizations using data from your hometown.
00:16:51
Speaker
Can you talk about, I guess the motivation or how, let me even ask how other people can think about doing similar sorts of projects for their city, for their neighborhood. You know, what, what is the thing that drives you to keep doing this as a, as a, you know, a thing on top of your regular full-time job? Yeah. I, uh, I feel like it's just something I'm passionate about and I've been interested in a long time. Um, just the idea of finding like a new open data set, just
00:17:21
Speaker
gets me excited to try and learn a new tool or design something new. So I think someone can recreate that for any city or place that they're interested in, whether you're interested in transit or urban planning or local sports team, just having passion for wanting to tell a story with the data.
00:17:42
Speaker
and then finding sources of inspiration and you'll find something. You'll want to go and create something. Let me also ask this. You guys have done a lot of
Handling Criticism and Public Reception
00:17:52
Speaker
very cool products. Do you ever get worried that you're going to put something out there that people are going to hate and they're going to rip you apart? We live in a pretty rip you apart.
00:18:02
Speaker
culture these days. So do you ever worry about that or you're just like you know what we're interested in this thing we're gonna make it and you know it's this is a passion this is a hobby this is a passion project so if it works it works if it doesn't it doesn't.
00:18:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think that is definitely something we worry about. You know, we've had instances where we've released a map and we've mislabeled something or there was a typo or something trivial in my mind that certainly wasn't trivial to hordes of people on the internet. So yeah, that's definitely constantly a concern. My perspective on that is
00:18:42
Speaker
You have to love the haters because they provide you a valuable service. When you put something on the internet, you're going to get stuff that you don't care about. You're going to get people that just are grumpy and don't want to say anything constructive. But I find you also have a lot of people who, whether they're nice or better or not, provide very constructive feedback. And so I think separating your sort of anxiety about people disapproving of what you're doing from and pulling out those strands of actual constructive
00:19:10
Speaker
criticism that are very productive is huge. I actually see value in just putting things out there, having that attitude that can't take it personally. You just have to pull out the nuggets of real good feedback. Right. Will, what about you? Do you ever have this moment of fear that you've put something out that everybody's going to hate and Mike Bostock's going to start yelling at you for doing something wrong?
00:19:37
Speaker
I mean, when we publish something at work, every time it goes out, I just get so much anxiety. Because people are ruthless on time. And they're important because it does show how much you care about the work that you're doing. And how much can they trust the data if they're seeing fine mistakes in your work as well. So they do have a valid point. But yeah, like Tom said, you
00:20:03
Speaker
It is constructive criticism for the most part and it's definitely giving me thicker skin and I think it is important and yeah, you just have to keep moving on and especially with databases when people are trying to create new ways of showing things. It's important for people to test the boundaries or to create pie charts that are different and people are just going to hate on them.
00:20:27
Speaker
Well, they're great projects.
Episode Conclusion
00:20:30
Speaker
I really enjoyed scrolling through them and learning some things about Vince Carter in Toronto that I didn't know before. Thanks for coming on the show and thanks for doing all this work. I wish you guys the best of luck as you keep working together. Thanks so much, Brad. Thank you very much, John. I really appreciate it.
00:20:48
Speaker
And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed it and learned a little bit something about maps and Toronto. I will put all the links to all these great projects from Tom and Will on the show notes page and be sure especially to check out their Metro map. It's really quite cool and informative. And if you are into coding and want to create one of those maps, they also wrote up basically a tutorial on how to do it. So super helpful.
00:21:11
Speaker
So I hope you enjoyed this week's show. Please feel free to connect on Twitter or on the show notes page and please rate and review the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast provider so that others can learn about it. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.