Making Big Data Visible

Hi.

Stamen

Monday, October 21, 13

Hello! And, welcome to my talk.

Making Big Data Visible
SxSW Eco, October 7. 2013

#BigDataVisible

Stamen


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.

Straight To The Point, Indeed

Quick Stamen fly-by
2 projects


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
R&D
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.


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://sealevel.climatecentral.org/

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.

Stamen
Thank You!


http://stamen.com
George Oates, Art Director
glo@stamen.com
@stamenglo

Making Big Data Visible

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