Talk20 - Heaps
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A talk I gave at BCJ for their Talk20 event, where various presenters gave presentations that were modeled after Pecha Kucha 20 slides long, 20 seconds per slide.
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Talk20 - Heaps
- 1. hi my name is sha
- 2. everything has become a giant fucking heap nick kallen sta.mn/hw
- 3. shorturl
- 5. chris jordan
- 6. so
- 11. sta.mn/y5p
- 12. cabspotting.org
- 20. on.fb.me/fcG8Ng
Editor's Notes
- hi, my name is sha. i studied architecture but have worked for the past few years on data visualization and mapping, and that’s what i’m going to talk about today\n
- why is data visualization important? i think it’s important because of this problem of heaps. what is a heap? a heap is what you call something you can’t quantify anymore. and i think the kind of problem a heap is is an interesting one, and one that data visualization is all about.\n
- for example, how many plastic bottles are here? this is a lot, but we kind of have a sense of the weight of it, and if we had more than 20 seconds we could count this. \n
- but if we zoom out a little more, it becomes harder to quantify, harder to comprehend. this then starts to become more about texture than composite, more beach than sand. \n
- but if you zoom out all the way, this is a work by Chris Jordan, called Plastic Bottles. This is 2 million plastic bottles, the number used in the US every 5 minutes. that’s insane. and this is the kind of heaping world we live in today, where the scale and pace are too vast and too fast for us to comprehend.\n(60x120")\n
- so. i think this is where data visualization can help us understand these insane things that are happening all around us, invisible either by distance, by abstraction, or by scale. and i’m going to walk through a bunch of projects, but i’m going to start off with a very simple project that i think illustrates this opportunity that mapping and visualization provide\n
- this is a map of the oil spill that happened last year. it’s a familiar outline, presented in a fairly familiar manner. but it’s very hard to grasp the scale of this disaster, and this project, called if it were my home, allows users to move the spill over their home\n
- this is what happens when you place the oil spill over san francisco. all of a sudden that familiar but distant outline becomes ominous, real, and visceral. \n
- and what happens when it’s not just plastic bottles we’re looking at, but people? how can we start to understand what it means to be at war? this was an initial sketch for a project for cnn of photographs of the soldiers killed in afghanistan and iraq\n
- and this whole project became about exposing the geography of afghanistan and iraq, and juxtaposing each soldier’s hometown with where they were killed. and it was heartbreaking to see the US just covered like this, where the war is not just a single number anymore, but a mass or a field\n
- and if you take this similar eye of visualization towards other datasets, you can start to peel away at the systems at work. here’s a map of all of the hurricanes that have ever reached landfall along the east coast. i also like to call this map senegal breathing fire on the US. \n
- similarly, we can start to expose the systems and flows at work in our own urban environments. here’s an old stamen project, a map of the movements of cabs recorded over a long enough time that the base streets aren’t even necessary anymore, that all you see is this skeletal version of san francisco accreted up through pure data\n
- this visualization over time can also be applied historically, where we can start to see the emergence of the new york subway system and the pulsing of midtown, the peak in the 60s and the slow climb back through the 2000s\n
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- we can also start to understand our cities\n
- and not just from a static point of view, but we can start filtering and parsing through this information on a very personal level. like what if i only wanted to live in areas where there were bars and restaurants nearby? we can start digging deep into this information and answering these questions\n
- and we can also start to investigate movements on an individual level. this is a map of my own checkins over time, where i start to see my own movements and behaviors, and start to approach this very personal artifact of *my* san francisco\n
- people made about twenty thousand maps in just a couple days, and they ranged all over, from movement down through thailand to world travels. and that to me is a super fascinating thing, and it’s something we’ve only been recently been able to start track and visualize and understand at scale\n
- and so i look at images like this from facebook, showing how 500 million people are connected, and it makes me super excited about the possibilities and the future of data visualization, especially in this data rich world we live in. and my hope is that we’ll move from this world of heaps to something we can start to comprehend the complexity of\n