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I want to talk to you, I want to
introduce Lisa Rost.
So Lisa loves to design data
visualizations. She is currently the
Mozilla Open News Fellow at
National Public Radio in Washington, DC.
If any you guys do not know NPR,
let me tell you it was the number one
thing I personally missed in the decade
from '99 to 2011
that I lived in Germany.
I'm almost as much as I miss currywurst
in the states now.
I know seriously, it's
amazing. It's way better than public
radio here. You have way better public TV
than we do, but we have way better public
radio. So if an opportunity, check out
NPR.org and look for shows like
Radiolab, all things considered fresh
air. But anyway, enough about these?
Absolutely. Any other suggestions in the
audience?
Yeah, absolutely.
Morning Edition.
I mean, I'm in New York City, so Brian
Lehrer, lots of different options.
But anyway, enough about Lisa's
workplace.
Lisa creates visualizations.
I'm for NPR now.
But previously, when in Berlin, she
designed for and with the open data
city Spiegel on target, Spiegel
talk data visualization universities and
also organize the date of his meetup.
This is one of the talks I was looking
forward to seeing, and so it's really
have a privilege for me to be able to
introduce Lisa.
But I'm not only here to see.
So, Lisa, take it away.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me, and thanks for the
introduction.
I'm not sure if you've got everything.
I think what you need to know about
me is that I take numbers
and I put them into something like that,
and I've done it for a long time now, and
I really like it.
And then data visualization is definitely
hyped, like to like
the demand increase over the last five or
10 years. Everybody wants to do it now,
but only recently we started
thinking about if these facts and figures
that are visualized here actually matter.
So that's what we did, especially this
year. Like this year, we
found our society, especially in
the U.S., that some people
take feelings and perceive them as
a truth.
So today I want to ask the question Can
you take truth and make
it evoke feelings?
Can we take data points and
make people care about them, especially
data points that can walk into a bar,
meaning humans?
And I want to ask a question of three
questions first and the first part I want
to talk about. My feelings are good and
my feelings are bad and why we can't have
them and why we should have them.
And as I can part, I saw shortly
talk about what it all has to do with
data visualization and the third part I
want to bring specific examples.
So feelings,
we all have these blurry things that
sometimes come to us and then sometimes
they leave.
These are only some of them.
So like right now, for example, I'm
pretty happy to be here.
I'm also grateful for being here.
And I also have like a small
version of fear, which is nervousness.
Actually, that's a huge part right now.
But there are two feelings here
that I live with separated, and these are
empathy and compassion.
Because empathy and compassion, we
direct to what somebody else and
they can have as a content, everything
that's on this list.
So let's define some terms here.
Let's make some distinctions
extinguishment.
Empathy
is when we feel the feeling
somebody else has, we put ourselves
in their shoes.
If you would have empathy with me right
now, you would also feel nervous.
And compassion is more like
sympathy.
Like if you would have compassion with
me, you would not be nervous.
You wouldn't have these negative
feelings, but you feel would
feel more like positive feelings like
laugh or sympathy for me.
And almost everybody on this planet can
agree that having empathy and compassion
is better than not having empathy and
compassion.
A quick Google search found that
smart people on the internet think that
empathy is the only way we will survive
for that.
Empathy makes for good people
and good people make for good societies.
And Obama is a big fan of empathy, saying
empathy. It makes it harder
not to act harder, not to help.
So empathy is something that comes in all
of us. We are really good at that.
We are really good at directing our
empathy to one of us.
Like, for example, this child that most
of you already know was
on a show in 2015 in Turkey.
But we have some troubles directing our
empathy to people.
Imagine I would have put my
beloved clone and she would have given
the talk to here at the stage, slightly
similar, but also slightly different.
It would be hard for you to direct your
attention towards me and towards her talk
at the same time, and it would
be really hard if all of us would be at
that stage, except you and you
would listen to all of us giving a talk.
I'm not sure if you would get anything
out of the talk, and it would be
super hard to direct your attention
and it's the same of empathy.
We have been really good at directing
empathy to one person, but we really,
really bad at directing or to lots
of people. That's why we can't have
empathy with this one kid, but not for
three thousand seven hundred seventy
other people who also died
crossing the Mediterranean Sea in 2015.
And I mean, that scales up.
That's not something that you feel, and
it's like a little bit blurry, etc.
But this photo of the kid
and actually led to huge donations
to the Red Cross.
And it also changed politics.
The Guardian Award that European leaders
have been shocked into forming more
compassionate policies by previously
hostile media outlets took a more
conciliatory tone and
look at the voting shocked into
the emotions for the reason for that.
It almost feels like they were forced
to have to have these
two to have these implications
thanks to the emotions.
That's the conclusion to
all of you. Our lives are actually
not all worth the same value.
We value lives more
if it's only like one or two or three,
and it's like the more life they are,
the harder to process and
we don't really have much empathy
for them left.
That's that's pretty sad.
I mean.
Yeah, it's it's really easy for us to
affect this one person and to have
empathy for that, but we can't multiply
it for three thousand seven hundred
seventy.
That's why they concluded that emotions
suck feelings out
of us.
OK, it's not the worst, but they're not
really articulate like
they are good and bad.
You have one can need.
It's good you have.
And that I can eat. It's not like that
doesn't make you less happy.
It's the same bad feelings.
If you have one death, it's bad.
If you have two deaths, that's not
double. That's not making you less sad,
and it might be even worse than that.
Paul Slovic, who did a
lot of research into empathy, he did
a study where he showed people
a child like Take the child, for example.
She has a miserable life.
She's living in Syria and you can help
her. You can make a donation and she
will have a better life.
Would you donate?
I think a lot of people, if you would
again like empathy, is something you
really good at.
But then I will tell you, OK, you can
have that child, but you
can't help her neighbor like she's
staying. And so she's like, she will have
like a very uncertain future, and all
the nations will go to this first child,
but not to the second one.
And then I will tell you all the same
thing about all these other children that
you can't help them and 40
percent, 40 percent of the top
in donations that the researchers
have seen towards that first child.
People are less likely to help if they
are reminded of all the people they can't
help. You want to make a difference.
Let's call it like a warm close.
You want to feel good about helping
and you're feeling, Yeah,
we want to feel like you make a
difference, and we don't want to get
reminded of all the difference we can't
make.
So maybe it's even like that pod
tests maybe actually
be value one life even more than
3000 lives, 3000 lives mean
nothing to us, but one life you're really
invested in like it's a huge difference
for us if one child dies
or not. But it doesn't really matter if
three thousand seven hundred seven people
die, or three thousand seven hundred
seventy one.
Sachs, he wasn't sacked.
It's really OK.
Yeah, no, but not articulate,
and there is this weird ego wants to
have impact thing going on.
It's makes me pretty angry.
How about if you don't do feelings
anymore and
just isn't everything?
Rationally, rationality is good.
Paul Bloom is like a big opponent of
empathy, he says. If you want to be good
and do good. Empathy is a poor guide,
and it's not just because of that,
because of empathy has this fear if you
can't really value lives properly
thing, but also because
empathy is not fair.
We tend to
we tend to help people and to have
empathy towards people who look like us,
who are looking cuter, who look
more like they need help.
That's not the same a personality.
Of course, he will treat everybody the
same.
But then again, what we tweet anybody,
actually, because what should I tell
my shadow cabinet? Don't care?
Why should I care for some child?
A. That has maybe some
very faraway impact
on the economy, but actually, you know,
I don't care.
So maybe rationality is actually also
not the solution.
I think I think you need both.
We need the numbers and the feelings.
We need numbers and narrative
and anecdotes and abstraction.
We need to slow system born if you what
kind of man and disaster seem to?
I think that's how it should be we should
make people care about a topic
and then we should tell them what to do
and how to do it in a very rational way.
First, we want to show them that they
should do something and we want them to
decide to do something and then we can
show them in the wash on our terms, how
to do it and what to do.
And that's what I want to talk about
in the rest of the talk.
So first, data visualization, what does
it have to do with that?
Well, most of that visualization looks
like that. Still,
it doesn't really do justice to the
people that we present.
These are about malaria deaths and
traffic fatalities and unemployed people,
and it doesn't really, you know, make
me care so much.
It's like we'll see more on a number
scale. It really speaks to my
analytical self.
And I think some of you might say, oh,
that's actually good word like data
visualization as opposed to speak to the
rational mind, and that's I actually like
that it doesn't try to manipulate me
like these super manipulating
emotional photos of kids
at the shore.
And I would say, OK, that that's fair.
It really depends on your goals in the
end. I think data visualization
is just a tool you can use
it to. We present data in a very,
very objective way.
But you can also you should be able to do
something like that that speaks more
to your emotions.
In the end, it's like language.
Language can also be super objective
and like super harsh and cold,
or you can have poems that
make you really feel things.
That it was positioned as a tool.
And if you want to evoke emotions
with that of a sensation, I feel like I
should be able to we should build a
tool kit to make that
possible, even if
most data visualization will still stay
in the technology to
swear.
So that's the rest of my talk.
How to make fields of data visualization.
I have some ideas, but I'm also very
happy to hear your ones.
First of all, an easy one, simple one
make use of colors.
We're all using colors.
Anyway, that initialization.
This, for example, is
Syria tracker that tracks the deaths
of Syrian people, and it comes
on a very comfortable cozy
lake, very
nice looking blue.
I think that really it's not what it's
about. In the end, I feel like again,
you were to trust us more to do what
you we present, if you would show it in a
slightly different way.
And that's the least you can do.
In fact, like the three most intense,
most emotional data visualizations
of the past year,
make it quite use a very impactful,
impactful use of colors.
The first one is about gun
deaths in the U.S.
The second one is about victims of
the Second World War, and the third is
about deaths from drones.
And they all have plaque as a background
and all have these highlights
of colors. And
yeah, this is really one of the simple
tools to created
empathy.
Sure, the data would mean for experience.
That's an interesting maybe.
You mentioned three layers.
First, you have to assess a table
just like black and white, like all your
numbers.
You don't really understand them all, and
they don't have any meaning for you
because you don't understand them.
So that's why you add to visualization.
That's what makes you understand the
data. That's what shows you what's
actually in the data and how to the
stories.
But then he wanted to add a layer, the
experience layer or like a meaning layer.
The Tetsu value should care.
That's why everybody is freaking out
about VR because VR does
exactly that. It puts you into a
situation. It makes you feel things
in a situation because your data, because
you have to experience.
So, yeah, experience makes a few things,
and I think that's something a lot of
you have seen. And I want to show that
again, because it's doing
that really well, not putting you in a
situation, but bringing the situation
to what you see if that works.
You make wish.
Granny.
Have you done your homework and a
general strike?
Ready or not?
Here it comes on in clashes with
volleys of munition against turf and
I say you.
Airstrikes on rebel positions.
We are going to stay on
topic.
All right.
Have you come to Richmond?
There are.
And.
People.
You, commissioner.
This view at more like 55 million clicks
of use until now.
It's really impactful again, it brings
you it doesn't put you into a situation
of peaceful situation to you.
And it's one step further
and visualizations like these ones.
I think you've seen these once before,
but they ask you to enter your zip code
or something and then they tell you what
the data looks like for you.
Now. But this is these
things. I'm what I thought.
Experiments like the building among
poster that recently.
The U.S. is pretty far away.
You have to swallow that whatever that
means, they take the ball and
put it in front of your door.
Basically, you can see what a dog looks
like or what looked like if it would be
actually a deer in your environment in
your experience that you have right now.
Something similar is doing the BBC that
with this new scheme,
but it put people in the lives of
Syrian refugees and let them make
decisions.
So you have, for example, you can decide
to pay somebody deposit
or have used to pay them the October
deposit.
Again, that's putting you into this
situation.
That was pretty advanced, but you can
actually make something more simple and
do some calculations.
CNN was doing that.
It calculated what it would mean if
one to 1.3 percent
of the population would be killed, like
it's the case right now in Syria.
I mean, I don't think that so many
Americans actually care about Syria,
but if three to four million Americans
would be killed in their own country,
like.
Wow. What we what we I get
on.
Yeah, there are lots of questions you can
ask to make these thought experiments,
these parallel universes, and I would
really like to see that more often done
and 2070 in the data visualization
scene.
Another example swim into one dot,
every project needs a story as stability
among guys, let's say.
And that's exactly what they do like,
they always have these data
visualizations beautiful at a top here,
for example, one that shows where
people who currently live in Berlin
actually come from.
But then they also go on a street and ask
people in suministro to 1.2 at
one data point and asked him and are
like, Are you firm?
Why do you live here? You like it in
Berlin, etc.
so that people can relate to somebody?
And that's an old journalistic trick,
right?
That's from the NPR website.
Most especially feature stories
start with like an anecdote at the
beginning here, for example, a photo of
one person and then go up level and high
level and show you the overview and show
what the data means or like, how
many how many people actually
have. Like similar stories because they
share the ad is similar
in a similar date up and.
And, of course, advocacy
organizations are doing that a lot.
That's actually interesting
because it actually states like
you can't lose sight of the individual
that actually says it's actually dead.
Don't just look at the numbers like you
will never see something like that that
will show you the data visualization.
It's a sign of how many people died, and
we always show you for the individual.
And that's one of my favorite Twitter
bots.
As somebody who works for the American
Census a lot, I really like it.
It shows you one data point of the
American census and tells
you all the data it knows about the data
point. And I think that's that's that's
a quite example of like how you
have data about millions of people.
It's like a statistics.
If you have data about one person, it's
a story.
So what are you talking about?
That's something that's also pretty old
or Tony Willard and his graphic designer
get arms already did it in the 1930s,
but he showed data about
people with actual symbols of people.
And that's what a New York Times are
still doing or has done in the
last years.
And The Washington Post.
And showed a mass as in of itself, the
last point.
It's similar to this zooming into dots
thing.
But it's more like you don't
just zoom into one dotted showed him as
an example, but actually show like all
the dots as like the whole
data, the Alcoholics
Anonymous are doing that.
For example, they focus on a small
step, they say.
Also, of course, being absent for
the rest of their lives is the goal of
the program.
Alcoholics are told to stay sober one day
at a time or one hour at a time.
You focus on what's close.
You focus on what's achievable.
And you're putting the data
closer, as you do with this example, for
example, 800000
killed in the last eight days versus
one life lost every 11 seconds.
The first number you can calculate, and
that's super important, too.
The second number is what speaks to your
heart, but speaks to emotions.
Passive essentially doing something
similar with their
like posture up to the German OkCupid.
Oh, they're like
the advertiser service that matchmaking
service.
Saying a single
14 off of every 11 minutes on
a website.
Whatever that means, they don't
say like 50000 people per year
falling off on powership.
They like focus on the individual because
you're standing on a subway platform and
you see that advertisement and you can
actually you can actually
imagine being that single or like
that single. He was alone.
And then you found somebody who is happy
and then you can say, OK, every 11
minutes is actually a lot.
Maybe I should sign up to be less lonely.
And that's just data
visualization I showed before
from periscopic about us
catnaps, which does something supposedly
interesting and similar.
So it's actually an animation, but I will
show the slides to explain them
what you can see as ox being drawn
for every person.
But then a trip like the dots trip at
some point because they get killed
by a gun, and then they keep trying
to act to show you how long that
person would have lived
in this show. One example I want to
explain the data visualization
by showing one example and then
another example, and
then another one and the initial three at
one point, etc.
And it goes, almost it goes.
Always faster and faster, and it
accelerates a lot until you end
it something like that.
So you can still see the dots and that's
the point I want to make.
It's not like this one data
box that you have.
You can still see and go into every
dot if you want to.
Something similar said about
the Holocaust by the Holocaust survivor,
Abdul hats back there are not six million
Jews murdered in one murder
six million times, and I urge you to do
it the next time you see like a big
number about people.
You imagine that thing that is going to
describe the it.
Three hundred thousand people
being actually happening to one
person and then just multiply it.
This is not quite six million, this is
five million six hundred thousand.
It's the last number the artist's home on
abaca or buy,
paint it if you paint it every single
number of on one two.
Exactly this number, you can see him
doing that.
And.
I always I wonder if he actually is the
person in this world who can
shots big numbers the best, who can
actually who actually knows what a big
number means.
Because he spent time with every single
number. What if these are the people?
He would know what it means because it
took him? Yes, years to like Whitey
Stone, but every number took only
like half a minute or so to write down.
Did it has a project that did something
similar? Stephanie Posobiec and such
a loopy wrote each other postcards
that are true to date.
So for example, this is a postcard from
Georgia Lupi, where she shows
all the songs she listened to
in in one week.
And it's not.
It's not generated by the three tracks
or like, Oh, or something, she actually
true all these things.
She spent time of every single data
point.
Now, going from like the use of that to
the creators are it's like, this is
something you can do as a creator to
understand big data better.
And she said Whoopi was whining about it.
She was she called something like that,
data humanism, and she said actually that
instead of saving time of data, spend
time off data and instead of data,
it's no data people.
So, yeah, that's that's what I wanted to
talk about.
Let me summed it up
by feeling so good, and maybe we don't
have to argue that that
feelings are like pretty bad
for like big numbers, but that we still
need them to make us actually care.
We can load up if they have this
visualization. We don't have to.
We can do it all.
I think we should think about
how we can achieve that.
And then I was talking about all of
options, how to make feelings with data
visualization, for example, making use of
color, swimming at home and not showing
what you're talking about.
If people symbols showing what
a data would mean for your experience and
showing that mass as individuals.
So, yeah, thank you.
Oh no. Wait, wait, wait.
These were three important points.
I think the fourth one is missing here.
This is also super important.
Once you made the feelings.
You need to do something.
You can't just leave people with their
feelings. You have some responsibility if
you create feelings and people because
they get helpless as heck when they
don't know what to do with it.
If you're angry, you need to punch
something. And if you're if you said you
need to cry and if you have empathy for
something, you need to make a donation or
something to not feel like the world
is burning if you don't do anything.
That's not something I will talk about
today, but keep it in mind.
Your responsibility as somebody who makes
people feel.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. That was awesome.
Thanks. That was awesome.
So one quick announcement before we take
questions.
We're going to clear the room after
the fact is over.
That means everybody who is in will go
out and use both doors
means all women like them.
If I call family history, if I could call
when I was at my very best, I
would have earned all skin bit have by
asking about some and I know
the lawyer. I know you're drinking friend
Nixon, Ford, Port-Harcourt. You don't
respond to golf.
So how no frog
in.
Because it cuts on a microphone icon.
Hey, thank you for your talk, and Maya,
you you very briefly mentioned
VR and the possibilities for
empathy in VR.
And I think I kind of
don't really see it that way.
So I'm curious about how you see it and
if you could say more about that, thank
you.
I'm not an expert, but I would love to
know why you don't see it that way.
I'll tell you after you told me, I mean,
I can no, I mean,
I'm happy to talk about it, but I'm just
sort of interested in how you're seeing.
If you think of a continuum of different
kinds of visual techniques that we have
to generate empathy
and feelings with
with different kinds of data points, then
data is one and VR
is another that's been kind of talked
about a lot.
I think people like Sam Gregory sort of
discuss what sort of problematic with
this in that
it just kind of makes it says that
it's going to immerse you in an
experience. But what it does is it just
puts you into that experience and then
drops you. It doesn't actually take you
anywhere with it and just you having the
experience is the most important part of
VR.
I mean, there are some which are slightly
different, more interesting,
and I can think of some examples, but I'm
kind of curious to think here about
what you would feel about VR.
And as somebody who works with data
numbers like what does that seem
like on the horizon?
That's open to saying thank you for your
point.
Again, I'm not a VR expert.
I've done it once I was blown away like
a pretty good level.
Yeah.
I think there's some reason that so many
newsrooms, like the New York Times,
invest and we are so much.
Yeah, of course, it's like shiny and
fancy and new, and that's why they love
to.
But I think that's something
maybe just to the newness, you know,
if you're like I can, I can still
remember the first experience I had.
And if this first, if your ISP's would
have been about two, you know, something
I would have like, I would have still
remembered that because it's something
you don't see every day.
I want to know, like I would like to
point about how people get trapped into
a situation and then it's like, that's
it, and they can always escape.
I wonder if there's actually.
The opposite of beneficial like if it
actually hurts, because,
yeah, because you don't, you don't lift
it like you have to experience it, you
can always escape.
This is.
I know. I'm not sure,
but thank you
so we can do one more question, maybe
two, if they're quick.
I'm a I'll go out.
I'm sure Liz will take some time outside
as well for more discussion
and hi, thank you for your talk.
I was wondering if you would
be giving this talk in front of a whole
bunch of right wing, horrible people.
Would you give the same talk?
Well, I'd bring horrible people.
Like, How horrible
is it?
Six of 10 horrible.
I don't really believe in horrible
people, but
I think
I would need to go through the slides
again. But actually, it feels like
there's nothing that should offend them
too much.
I will. I will let you know, though, the
next time I will give a talk and wander
off like lots of horrible I think people
and then we, you know, we can have a
discussion about what I should leave out
or something to not get hurt.
Thirty seconds.
OK.
Thank you for a really inspiring talk.
Most of the great visualizations I've
seen were designed as a very personal
experience for one single person to
experience or observe at once.
And I'm curious if you have thoughts
about visualizations that are designed
to connect people or to be experienced by
more than one person.
Oh wow, OK, I've never thought about that
at all. This is super interesting.
You mean like visualizations that
as opposed to be seen or like experience,
but lots of people?
I mean, I've definitely seen that
optimizations in museums, and I think
this is the closest one I can think of,
like 3D visualizations
of visualizations. You need to build
together, I guess.
Hmm.
Let's talk more after you guys continue
outside
people, let's let's talk about the down
towards this event.
I'm sure
there'll be a great conversation over.