Notes From Tapestry 2013

Yesterday I had the immense pleasure of joining about 100 other designers, programmers, educators, data scientists, journalists and storytellers in a day-long conference "designed to advance interactive online storytelling with data."

Below is a list of links to many of the presentation examples followed by notes on the presentations. You might like the way it's presented on github better - my blog isn't ideal for this kind of content.

If you'd like to make any contributions or corrections, please leave a comment, tweet me @nonrecursive, or submit a pull request :)

Resources

Keynote by Jonathan Corum

When we tell stories we adjust them based on audience - can't do that with a graphic

Have an audience He partitions his audience into reader viewer listener user

Focus on the people rather than the mechanism/content delivery vehicle

A colleague think s of designing for bart simpsons vs lisa simpsons quick overview (Bart) vs ability to deep dive (Lisa)

three types of people (science graphics) high school science student busy commuter - how to keep them interested instead of going to their phone, playing a game his grandmother - does it pull together as a cohesive visual whole?

whole goal is to design for someone else tensions oversimplification vs. overwhelming detail explanation vs. decoration storytelling vs interactivity - narrative vs exploration don't be your own audience

show ideas + evidence understand, translate, display, explain find the central idea. find one idea to use as the basis for your graphic

respect the reader - help them through the story allow for multiple entry points - compartmentalized graphical sections interactive tools to allow reader to pace themselves through use disparate scales to give context. Example, mixing longjump distances with free-throw line

add meaningful annotations close proximity between graphics and labels don't make people go back and forth between graphics and labels another way to provide context example: annotate each step in a sequence. flea jumping

show change motion show large scale, small scale what's happening each step change in form is another kind of change

reduce complexity and opportunities for confusion adding interface can be adding complexity

reduce tedium interact with data, not the interface strip out tedious activities - usability

visualization is not explanation dont let technology drive add enough information beyond your visualization to explain a pattern in data or structure your visualization to reveal and explain patterns

reveal patterns layer multiple data sets

respect the data show what's unique about it if your visualization can apply to something completely different, you might not be telling the unique story. detainees vs cups of tea

edit - throw things away. throw as much away as possible but actually tell a story If you're spending most of your time editing you know you're on the right track

apply common sense vigorously

Showing is Not Explaining, Pat Hanrahan

trying to explain Euclid's algorithm for Greatest Common Divisor algorithm animation / explanation

problems with animation motion is fleeting and transient cannot simultaneously attend to multiple animations ... more

Pat showed the animation of the algorithm, but it didn't really explain how the algorim worked

I had trouble thinking of what to note for this one, would greatly appreciate contributions here.

Choosing the Right Visual Story, Cheryl Phillips

Side note: This seemed mostly aimed at journalists.

What's the story? data without a theme is just a bunch of data - not a story who what when where why how - oldies but goodies interview your data. think of it as the man on the street. keep asking it questions

avoid "notebook dump" don't put every last detail in the story

use the nutgraf (theme) to help define a strong visualization

data is more than numbers -- what little stories make up the larger whole which can be visualized? example: methadone the politics of pain example: family tree of songlaw



29, Nigel Holmes

My sparse notes here don't really do the talk justice, probably because I was enthralled with the presentation. Especially Nigel attempting the long jump - I doubt any of us will forget seeing that!

29 is not interesting in itself, but interesting in context

you understand something when you see it next to something you already something understand

context is the key to understanding

The Art of Honest Theft: Evolution of a connected scatterplot, Hannah Fairfield

How graphics influence each other

if you move away from plotting time against the horizontal you can reveal interesting trends

See Driving Shifts Into Reverse and Driving Safety, in Fits and Starts

what's next? one technique: associate ancillary content (animations) with scroll so that extra information shows up in a way that it's tied to what the reader is reading at that moment (this idea shows up a lot during the conf) * focusing on immersive content * it's important to carve out time, even just 10%, to play



The Why Axis, Bryan Connor

nick felt (?) was inspiration

is a critic on the why axis, but doesn't mean that in a negative way

"the finished piece frequently acts as a seductive screen that distracts us from the higher level of investigation"

move past being psychics into being an investigator: as a critic, move from guessing to asking

once you know the objective of the visualization you're able to judge whether it succeeded or failed

designers: provide retros. be accessible to critics

Visual storytelling in the Age of Data, Robert Kosara

academics don't get the idea of presenting data, communicating data. it's just an afterthought

argues that stylizing charts is quite useful. helps to tell the story. emotional impact? example: monstrous data by Nigel Holmes

there's a danger to telling stories can lead you down the wrong path example: driving an electric car in the parking lot until the battery runs down

story telling potential of charts

Story Depth Tells a Story Facts Narrative Information Scent Focus Audience Author

storytelling affordances (I love the idea of storytelling affordances) the form which lends itself to storytelling what are they? reading direction, left to right in the famous napoleon chart, the area gets thinner follow along a line, like following a journey on a map uses the driving safety in fits and starts article as example animations direction - the bush admin vs. obama admin us job loss bar chart effective way of walking you through developments

narrative ties facts together provides causality walks you through a story

facts - story depth

focus - tells a story kind of the natural enemy of more data you must be selective in presenting data for it to be a story

information scent - story depth hints used to guide people, indicate that there's more data. example: the jobless rate for people like you present a lot of information, but focus only on one bit. provide other data in a less visually prominent manner

author - tells a story

audience - story depth

"we're at the cusp of something amazing and powerful that goes way beyond what's out there right now"

comics and visual communication, scott mccloud

in a 10" cube box of air is information wifi, cell, radio until there's something to decode that air, it really is just empty

we both receive meaning and create it on the fly the artist gives a hint of life, and the audience will meet them half way

cartoonists simplification creating a kind of human calligraphy write with pictures

human calligraphy takes many forms body language facial expressions

there are six primary emotional expressions anger disgust happiness surprise sadness fear the six primary combine anger + happiness = cruelty you can paint on the face the variety of emotions

the grimace project apparently useful for kids on the autism spectrum

secret ingredient of the look of love is sadness

all pictures are words

all pictures speak

all pictures have something to say

something happens in lower grades - teach kids to write and to draw at a certain point we teach kids words can be used for lists poems express themselves

but pictures - we try not to be too specific

this overlooks the fact that pictures have a multiplicity of uses can transmit messages, emotions

as a result we have a society that divorces pictures from... specificity? we have downstream pictures - advertising don't have as much going upstream

comics are a way to send messages upstream - can go out to a mass audience but retain their subjectivity

will eisner believed comics can teach the influencing machine

tone is important readiness.gov spawned great parodies

now people are empowered to combine words and pictures anyway they want to example: historical event facebook pages

we need to be vigilant of cognitive load time the speed at which individual parts load is the speed at which we can convey complex info the rsanimate series, www.thersa.org

synchronization of data/visuals with content "i'm not going to even allow you to think about anything other than what I'm talking about right now" order of presentation matters "if I don't need to think it, I don't need to see it" "the quicker the parts the richer the whole" cognitive load

"form and content must never apologize for each other"

the grammar of comics is putting one picture after another creating a flow of time between images as we move through space we move through time any two images, we'll find a story, we'll find a narrative cartoonists are finding the poetry in the gaps between frames

as storytellers, you want your audience to lose themselves in the story all narrative art forms are based on extremely simple principles in comics: space = time

"each successive technology would appropriate the previous technology as its content"

grumpy old man rant about form factor we see the world as rectangles in landscape mode what possibilities open up when you consider the monitor to be a window? lots of cool examples of comics taking advantage of the possibilities inherent in browsers



responsive web design separating content from presentation a noble impulse but at the same time there are art forms which are fixed. comics is one of them

the form matters! in comics, the spatial relationship is part of the artistic intent

when you have violent shifts in the landscape, the only thing you can do is hold on to basic principles in comics, people losing themselves in the story



Many thanks to the hosts for putting together a great conference. I'm looking forward to next year's!

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