Making Big Data Visible

StamenHi.

Monday, October 21, 13

Hello! And, welcome to my talk.

StamenMaking Big Data Visible

SxSW Eco, October 7. 2013 #BigDataVisible

I’m George Oates, Art Director at a small San Francisco studio called Stamen. We’ve been around since 2001, and we make maps. Maps of place, and maps of data.

Quick Stamen fly-by

2 projects

Straight To The Point, Indeed

Today, I’ll be talking to you about

This is us, standing in front of a watercolor map billboard we made. It’s in San Francisco, just a couple of blocks from the office. This is 10/12ths of us. We’re made up of designers, engineers and administrators.

Independent Company

Small Recombinant Teams

Being independent means we can work on what we want; what interests us.

Client Work

Art/Experiments

We do client work so we can have time to do R&D and experiment.

Crime Maps

Building Maps

Time Maps

Space Maps - that’s a WebGL 3D map of the surface of Mars

Watercolor maps

There is a lot more about Stamen on our website. For now I’d like to focus on 2 main projects, and then end with a couple of quick thoughts about the challenges of so much data.

Creative-Commons licensed maps available for you to use.

maps.stamen.com

Watercolor maps

There is a lot more about Stamen on our website. For now I’d like to focus on 2 main projects, and then end with a couple of quick thoughts about the challenges of so much data.

Help with Analysis

Help with Publicity

OK, so. Making Big Data Visible. Our clients come from all over the place... Entertainment, Government, Private Enterprise, and increasingly, Science. In most cases, we mostly see 2 reasons that people come to Stamen. Help with analysis, and help with publicity.

Both of these angles are getting increasingly difficult, thanks to the general and pervasive increase in the volumes of data we’re creating. This is particularly true in scientific research.

“Show us what we’ve got”

Arguably, Stamen Design is one of the companies in the world that began the practice of data visualization, in the first decade of the 20th century. It was

Understand the data we’re working with.

Draw everything.

How does it change over time?

Is place important?

Make it clear. Make it beautiful.

Our basic exploration practice.

PROJECT 1: Mapping Bay Grasses for the Chesapeake Bay Program

CC BY 2.0 by chesbayprogram

The Chesapeake Bay Program is a consortium of groups such as EPA, NOAA, the National Parks Service, as well as several universities around its shores. It’s primary aim is the study and restoration of the Bay (which is huge, by the way).

Almost 40 years worth of aerial photography, with annotations.

Basic, informative.

Draw everything.

All the numbers we have for water temperature, turbidity, and salinity.

See holes.

All the numbers we have for water temperature, turbidity, and salinity.

How does it change over time?

Make it clear. Make it beautiful.

We enjoyed the cartography on this project... Underwater!You can see here how the land is pushed right back in the design. You can see roads on land, but we didn’t want land detail to overwhelm the bathymetry data, or information about bay grass density.

Working directly with experts.

Dr. Bob Orth, from the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. Bob’s been studying the Chesapeake Bay for almost 40 years, both in the water, and way above it, using aerial photography to map the density of grasses in the bay, which are a good indicator of overall health of the system.

We interviewed Bob to get his take on the bay, and he helped us identify “segments of interest” which were good to point out to people because there’d been a particularly interesting change there - something the public probably wouldn’t work out on their own. We highlighted these in the final piece, and included narrative from Bob.

Working directly with experts.

He said: “I was giving a talk to a fish club, and kept talking about “water quality”. Someone popped up and said “you’ve got to stop talking about “water quality” – when the public hears that they think of herbicides, pesticides, and chemicals. They liked it much better when talking about “dirt & crap””

3 decades of data brought to life!

http://www.chesapeakebay.net

PROJECT 2: Surging Seas for Climate Central

CC BY 2.0 by charliekwalker

Climate Central is an independent organization of leading scientists and journalists researching and reporting the facts about the changing climate and its impact on the American public.

Last year, we released the first version of the Surging Seas visualization, and I’m about to give you a sneak peek at the not-yet-released version 2.

http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/

“the most frightening, important map of the year”

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/12/2012s-year-maps/4196/

Here’s version 2. We’ve changed the cartography design to (hopefully) have even more visual impact. We’ve introduced terrain into the mix, which we thought was important, since it can potentially block the flow of water.

We’ve increased the fidelity of the satellite imagery that represents land which would be underwater.

You can see here the Red Hook area of Brooklyn, one of the hardest hit areas in Hurricane Sandy.

Sandy rose to 13 feet. (This is 10.)

TO FINISH: A few tips on Making Big Data Visible

I’d love to say the best answer is to hire Stamen, but, not everyone has money to spend on design thinking. So... some pointers?

Map what’s obvious and show people.

It’s surprising how effective it is to map what you know. I’m not talking about a geogrpahical map particularly either. Have a think about ways to represent your work visually. Talk with family and friends about your work, and make a note of the sorts of questions they’re asking you.

Think about data accessibility.

It’s hard to think about how to package up your data so other people can use it. It takes time, and effort. Don’t worry if there are a few errors or gaps - just let people know up front.

Think about data accessibility.

http://hint.fm/wind/

This wind map was a personal art project, built by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, with data gathered from around the web.

Think about data preservation.

I went to a really interesting workshop a couple of weeks ago... it was about the creation of a new Institute for Sustainable Earth Sciences Software... one of many interesting things that popped up over those 2 days was about how some published papers maybe being made invalid because the experiments in them can’t be reproduced anymore, because either the software used to conduct them is gone, or the data is lost.

I used to work at a non-profit called the Internet Archive, where you can put up files for free. No harm in shoving some copies of your working data somewhere other than the various commercial entities like Dropbox or Amazon.

Produce & publish in low-res formats

Keep sharing work & tools you make. Even the raw stuff.

This superb thing is an accidental LiDAR capture of an elephant in the Lope National Park, Gabon, reported by Simon Lewis via Twitter. While researchers were surveying forest density in the park, they found this! Now it’s almost my favorite thing on the internet. If you wan tto see for yourself, just Google “lidar elephant”. I didn’t have a clue that LiDAR was being used in forestry and preservation... now I do, thanks to this chap.

Talk about big data - LiDAR captures about 1 million data points per second.

Thank You!

Stamenhttp://stamen.com

George Oates, Art Directorglo@stamen.com @stamenglo

Making Big Data Visible

quick thoughts

aerial photography

13watercolor

2 main projects

working directly

water temperature

water quality

data accessibility

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