Big Data. Huge Insights.
Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always show the whole story either. Especially given the scale at which data proliferates, piles up, and just sits there mutely. Fortunately, data visualization experts and amateurs are helping to make sense of it. And that means taming data to shape a better world, a better life, and just maybe to find better parking.
PHOTOGRAPHY«BY ERIC«HAINES ∂
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It’s Saturday morning on a sunny June day in 2011 in the spacious, brick-walled, San Francisco offices of Adobe Systems. Roughly 100 nerds have locked themselves inside for the foreseeable future, hunched over computer screens crunching numbers. By nerds we’re talking smart, successful, talented men and women whose expertise spans design, user experience, programming and coding, data analysis, and more. Ian Johnson, for example, is an intern at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the visualization group. He’s also working towards a Ph.D. in computational sciences at Florida State University. But still, it’s Saturday and sunny, and Ian and the others are here why? The answer is Data In Sight, a data visualization hackathon taking place over a weekend and co- organized by swissnex San Francisco, Creative Commons, and the Netherlands Office for Science and Technology.
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Visualization«of«Swiss«Train«Flows by«Interactive«Things ∂
A hackathon describes a competitive event in which computer programmers, software developers, designers, and the like collaborate over a pre– defined period of time—a gorgeous weekend, for example—on an intense project with a specific focus. This hackathon has participants mashing up and tweaking freely accessible, or “open data,” to tell visual stories. More than a dozen high–profile sponsors have signed on to support the initiative, including Adobe, which donated its space, Mozilla, LinkedIn, Gephi, Nespresso, and others. There’s free food and caffeinated beverages (they’re in this for two days), along with couches, flip charts, work tables, and plenty of WiFi. Speakers and judges at the top of the field are here from around the world to inspire, advise, and select winning projects on Sunday evening.
visualization firm Interactive Things. “Data and data literacy are important fields,” he says. The hackathon certainly proved data visualization’s impact on intern Ian Johnson’s future a few months afterward, when one of his teammates hired him based on the experience. “This was my first time doing data visualization as a real thing,” he recalls. “ I’d done interactive, graphical coding before. But I’d never taken data, visualized it, and told a story about it. And now I’m deep into it.” Johnson’s teammate at Data In Sight, Kristen Chan, worked for Visual.ly at the time, a company that offers solutions for infographics and visualizations. She was impressed with the young coder and encouraged him to apply to her company. He got the job, left his Ph.D. program, and is now embedded in the “data viz” scene in the Bay Area and working as a senior software engineer at Visual.ly. Quite an outcome for a weekend of nerding.
One such speaker is Benjamin Wiederkehr, of Zurich–based user experience and data
BENJAMIN«WIEDERKEHR ∂
“Data and how people collect and understand and act on it is definitely something that will impact our lives in the future quite profoundly. I think we can make better decisions [using data] and be smarter about our own behavior based on real insights, not just assumptions.”
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Deconstructing Big Data
Data visualization simply refers to the visual representation of data. Think not only graphs and charts, but also genuinely complex and dynamic stunners. For instance, Wiederkehr’s studio conceived the City of Geneva’s swirling, Van Gough–like animation of mobile phone traces. Or consider the interactive Crimespotting maps of the cities of Oakland and San Francisco that Stamen Design compiled. Both demonstrate the power of rendering large data sets. But why data, and why now? The topic of Big Data, the massive amounts of unstructured zeroes and ones our digital world spawns, is hot and only getting hotter. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2012, the topic of the data deluge was a central theme. In a February article in The New York Times, technology reporter Steve Lohr wrote, “Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip.” Recently, the popular tech blog GigaOM covered the booming job market (and rising salaries) for anyone with skills as a data scientist. Why? Because companies in all industries are realizing the need to interpret the huge data sets now available,
and they need specialists with skills in math and statistics to help. Two projects rooted in Switzerland demonstrate data’s timely relevance. Both are under consideration for EU Flagship funds on the order of a billion Euros each over a 10–year period. Both are multidisciplinary and international in scope. Both involve data and lots of it. FuturICT, led by Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), is described in the November 2011 issue of Scientific American. Helbing and his collaborators seek to use the ever–increasing streams of data to build a computing system that would predictively model the entire world and discover options for a sustainable future. Guardian Angels is the second project, and is led by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with ties to ETH Zurich as well. It imagines smarter, healthier living through autonomous nanosensors integrated into daily life and linked to the cloud. The sensors could be embedded in our clothes and surroundings and alert us to potential harm or threat to health.
Visualization‘of the«Marvel«Universe«social«graph«by«Kai«Chang, Tom«Turner,«and«Jefferson«Braswell.«Data«In«Sight award-winner:«Most«Aesthetically«Pleasing. ∂
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“ Humans are bad at understanding scale and time. When you talk about war in Iraq or the Gulf oil spill or climate change, these are big, huge, abstract problems that are hard for people to understand in a real way. People get shape and color easily but not spreadsheets. The rise of visualization is part of coping with that influx of data and the need to understand the scale of the problems we’re dealing with.”
As the amount of data blooms, data visualization and other techniques provide a crucial dashboard for helping us cope. Sha Hwang was a Data In Sight juror and is Design Technologist at Trulia, a real estate search engine that helps users decide where to live. “We’re generating more data than ever,” he says. “The number of tweets every day is just insane to me. People upload several billion photos every month to Facebook. On the flip side of that, humans are bad at understanding scale and time. When you talk about war in Iraq or the Gulf oil spill or climate change, these are big, huge, abstract problems that are hard for people to understand in a real way. People get shape and color easily but not spreadsheets. The rise of visualization is part of coping with that influx of data and the need to understand the scale of the problems we’re dealing with.”
swissnex San Francisco’s leadership in the hackathon was a natural fit. Over the last couple of years, from its position in the middle of the world’s technology center, the swissnex team observed as the topic of data rose in prominence and urgency. The event concept aligns perfectly with the organization, which connects people and ideas across continents in science, education, innovation, and even art where it intersects with technology. Data visualization in particular blends science and technology with creative pursuits such as graphic design and art. The growing importance of open data and the power it gives citizens to explore complex issues make it even more compelling. So for swissnex the decision to curate an experience around open data and data visualization was a no brainer. Data In Sight was the result, but the hackathon was only the beginning.
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Opening Up to Open Data Is access to data an inalienable right? Some would argue so. Perhaps in recognition of this, governing bodies are heeding the call. In 2009, the US government started Data.gov, a Web site that makes government data available to the public. At the local level, San Francisco is a leading city in its sharing of data. DataSF, the city’s site for government data, also launched in 2009 and includes nearly 200 datasets from a range of city departments. In 2010, the Mayor’s Chief Innovation Officer, Jay Nath, authored Open Data Legislation requiring that all non–confidential datasets be made available as part of a larger goal to engage constituents and enhance transparency and accountability. The site features an App Showcase with a collection of applications developed and built by private individuals and organizations using
public data. Examples include apps like EcoFinder for iPhone that helps you figure out where to recycle. Or Routesy, which aids in navigating the region’s transit systems. In June 2012, the city of Zurich in Switzerland will follow municipalities like San Francisco and release a significant portion of its data to the public. At the same time, public accessibility to technology for creating and consuming data visualization is keeping pace. And now that the public has a taste, they want more. “There’s something important about the idea of open data,” Data In Sight juror Hwang says. “Data should be out there so people can investigate different aspects of it. A lot of people take for granted that even the visualizations they see are truth with a capital T. The reality is that all these things are
filtered in some way. It’s important to have more angles to look at and more perspectives.” Peter Gassner is the research and technology strategist at Interactive Things in Zurich, and he attended Data In Sight along with his colleague Benjamin Wiederkehr. “The data that decisions are based on in the government should be open to the people,” he adds. “If they are, they’re mostly in very difficult formats or available on request, or you have to pay for them. The value [of open data] is to bring transparency to enable the people to check on what their government is really doing. That’s in a way our responsibility.”
Data«In«Sight«Winner:«Best«Dynamic/ Interactive«Visualization.«Disaster Strikes,«From«Barret«Schloerke,«Edward Fine,«Mariana«Anderle,«Mary«Becica, and«Norman«Klein,«Represents«natural Disasters«Over«Time«By«Number«Killed, Affected,«And«Total«Monetary«Cost. ∂
BENJAMIN«WIEDERKEHR ∂
“ I really like how swissnex identifies the trend and really supports it on so many different levels, and you push the idea through. You wouldn’t necessarily think of Switzerland as being on the forefront of visualization. But nonetheless, Switzerland can play a role and is in a great position to push this field forward, especially if we can nurture collaboration.”
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More Data, More Better
Interactive Things’ Wiederkehr, who blogs at datavisualization.ch, became involved in Data In Sight when members of the swissnex San Francisco team met him in 2011 at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. Wiederkehr hosted a panel there on Social Media Data Visualization. After the conference, he agreed to return to the US for the hackathon and to serve as a judge and a speaker at the weekend event. The experience led to more than Wiederkehr could have expected: new professional connections, new friends, and new growth in the data visualization community in Switzerland. “I was really surprised by how many people showed up to the hackathon, how enthusiastic they were, and how good the projects were that they were able to achieve within those two days,” he remembers. “I was very happy to sit on the jury, get to know really high level folks from San Francisco and the Bay Area, and have good, high quality discussions about visualizations. What’s important to note is how swissnex connected the dots by including speakers from the Netherlands and Switzerland, and bringing them in touch with the local community in San Francisco.” One of those fellow jury members was Stanford University computer science assistant professor Jeffrey Heer, who is now an unofficial advisor to Wiederkehr’s research. He’s pursuing a master’s in interaction design at the Zurich University of the Arts. For Wiederkehr’s company, the hackathon reaped important results as well. They were able to use connections made at Data In Sight to visit Mozilla and LinkedIn and give presentations about their work. And based on relationships established in San Francisco, Wiederkehr brought Visual.ly on board for a panel he organized at the 2012 SXSW conference. Although the hackathon came to a close after two days, the data conversation continued. swissnex San Francisco followed up a few days later with a sold out panel discussion on the topic, “Does data tell us what to think?”, which explored trends in data visualization and the ways it can be deceitful. Shortly after Wiederkehr returned to Switzerland, he helped organize concurrent hackathons in Zurich and Lausanne called Make Open Data CH, which
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swissnex sponsored. These simultaneous events were firsts for Switzerland and brought together thinkers, data experts, and makers for workshops and project development. The organizers expected 30 participants at each location. In the end, over 100 people showed up. The city of Lausanne provided data about its buildings and energy consumption, and through the eZurich initiative the data enthusiasts had access to that city’s most recent investment statement. Projects like Where Did My Taxes Go? calculated how long the city could run on one contribution alone. “Make Open Data CH was highly influenced by Data In Sight,” Wiederkehr says. “It was good that I could bring in some experience that I learned [in San Francisco]. This knowledge transfer was something that helped us.” Another round of these open data camps took place in Switzerland at the end of March 2012 on the theme mobility. Throughout 2011 and into 2012, swissnex continued to support the data conversation and the data visualization community by hosting gatherings called meetups in the swissnex event space with Visual.ly, Ian Johnson’s new employer. Johnson also started a group specific to the D3 tool, a programming library for making html5 visualizations, and he held one of the first meetups on the subject at swissnex. In 2012, Data In Sight returns with an ambitious, multi–city initiative. Together with the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), swissnex San Francisco is organizing a three–week, online visualization competition in which people from all over the world are invited to merge transportation– themed data sets and draw meaningful insights from three cities: San Francisco, Singapore, and a city in Switzerland. “I think what you have planned with GAFFTA and cities around the world is super exciting,” Wiederkehr says. “I really like how swissnex identifies the trend and really supports it on so many different levels, and you push the idea through. You wouldn’t necessarily think of Switzerland as being on the forefront of visualization. But nonetheless, Switzerland can play a role and is in a great position to push this field forward, especially if we can nurture collaboration.”
Visualizing is Believing
In the Adobe offices it’s now Sunday afternoon, and the hackathon teams are frantically completing their projects. Judges will award prizes, such as LinkedIn Pro Accounts and Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium. Of the 20 groups that started off the weekend, 14 present. A group named Disaster Strikes plots natural disasters by type (fire, earthquake) and country and presents options to view the data by the number killed, affected, or total monetary cost of the tragedy. A team called Academia is an Iceberg mashes up Mendeley data with LinkedIn connections. Another group crafts dazzling representations of the connections between characters in the Marvel Comic Universe (turns out the Invisible Woman is the most connected of the Fantastic Four)—and wins the award for most aesthetically pleasing. The team behind Parkalator builds a live, real–time Web site to find cost and availability of metered parking in San Francisco. This wins most actionable. And a presentation of CuriouSnakes demonstrates cheerfully colorful bubbles dancing across the screen. Trap one, and you read a question entered into AOL’s search tool. Why is Star Jones in the hospital? Who invented peanut butter?
What year was hemophilia discovered? What is the largest river in California? When do the swallows return to San Juan Capistrano? Ian Johnson’s project, Silenced, analyzes data on child abuse. “I was having fun figuring out how to visualize it, but at the same time it’s a serious issue that affects more people than we’re even aware of. It was an interesting juxtaposition,” he remarks. “The amount of data on it and the data sets that were available were not satisfactory. One takeaway was that if more data were accessible, it’d be easier to get the issue out there.” Although Johnson didn’t win a top prize, he did gain important insight into the role of data visualization. And the next iteration of the hackathon, he says, may yield the biggest prize of all. “Last year’s Data In Sight went beyond connecting people,” says Johnson. “But the next one with the three cities competition, that’s taking it to another level of thought leadership that will directly influence civic change. You’re paving the way for good ideas to come to life.”
Academia«is«an‘Iceberg,«by«William«Gunn, Giorgio‘Caviglia,‘and‘Pino‘Trogu,«won Best‘Fusion‘of«Multiple‘Data‘Sets‘at Data‘In‘Sight.«among‘scientists‘reading each‘other's‘papers‘on‘the‘Web‘site Mendeley,‘relatively‘few‘have LinkedIn‘accounts. ∂
“Last year’s Data in Sight went beyond connecting people. But the next one with the three cities competition, that’s taking it to another level of thought leadership that will directly influence civic change. You’re paving the way for good ideas to come to life.”
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