Watch the film of David McCandless on Vimeo.
Jeremy Myerson
I’d like to welcome our first speaker this afternoon. His name is David McCandless and he’s a writer and creative director. His specialist subject is ‘anything strange and interesting’ um and he’s an expert in something I’m very interested in, which is info-graphics and data visualisation. So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David.
David McCandless
Thank you. OK, I shall attain the clicker zone. Great, so yeah I love visualising data information, um and I love what happens when you do that, when you visualise information you can start to see patterns and connections you couldn’t see before, perhaps patterns and connections that really matter. And also I take it a step further and say, if you design that visual information, so that it tells a story or that it allows you to focus on things that are really interesting or really meaningful, then magical things kind-of start to happen - strange and interesting and unexpected things.
So I want to take you through some of the stuff that I’ve done with the spirit – and one little seed I want to plant early on is play: the idea of playing with data the idea of playing with information. This is a - you might have seen this online – and by the way if you follow my blog or you’ve read my book I’m going to apologise because you’re going to see a lot of stuff that you’ve seen already – sorry! Um, this is a Billion Dollar-o-Gram, this is like a visualisation of billion dollar amounts as reported in the press. And this image kind of rose out of the frustration in my with the reporting of these figures as…they’re reported as self-evident facts, you know 500 billion for this pipeline, 50 billion for this war, whatever. But these are mind-boggling amounts of money. They make no sense to our minds. So, but if you visualise them and you put them in relation to each other, you start to be able to kind-of relate to them. It de-abstractifies them if you like.
So I’ve take those amounts scraped from The Guardian, New York Times, various places like that, visualised them – scaled these boxes according to the amounts and the colours here is the motivation behind the money, so er…purple is war, green is earning money, that kind of thing. So immediately you’re de-abstractified – I won’t use that word again, sorry. But also you can start to see relationships and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports. It becomes a kind of material you can start to play with. And just recently I took this, this kind-of data and played with it a bit more – let me just show you this…Can we do the thing that we said we’d do? Can we do the thing that we said we’d do? Yeah. So, I’ll pretend to click it and…yeah, great
Video
So, data, playing with it using information as a material. Huh…pretend click… there’s that data again in a billion dollar format. This is the UK budget, some of the figures you saw there. But still, this is in the realm of abstraction, still taking about billions, and still there’s that disconnect. So I took those amounts and I trans-coded them into a metric I think is a bit more…a bit easier to relate to. So here… this is how much… those amounts converted into how much the average tax payer - UK tax payer pays every day in their tax contributions. So the average salary in the UK is around about £27,000. So this is the amount you pay every day towards these various aspects. The NHS costs you £9 a day, museums cost you 3p a day and Scotland costs you £2.93, which you might consider to be good value, or maybe not!
But again, the experience here is like trying to bring this stuff kind-of down so we can start to relate it. It’s the same information but it’s just presented in a slightly different sort of way, using a different metric. So combining visualisation and kind-of relative units.
So, that’s one thing I love doing. Another thing I love doing is just kind-of exploring data, looking for stories. An image you might have seen online is a time-line of the world’s biggest fears. Lets take a look at it. OK, this is the world’s biggest fears. These are media scares, things that we’ve got scared about in the last few years. I’m going to label this one. Um, pinky here is…oh sorry this is time and then the height here is the intensity of these stories, how much they’re been repeat reported in the media. So this is Swine Flu: pinky, yellow is Bird Flu, er…the orange one there is Sars, the little grey thing in the corner there is the Millennium Bug, these green lumps are asteroid collisions and the blue lumps at the front are the killer wasps.
So these are the things we’ve been afraid of in the last few years. And it’s really…what’s odd is I’ve kind-of, I was curious because it felt like there was a fear coming every two years, there was something we knew we needed to be scared about. Er, but it was interesting because there was a hidden pattern here that I didn’t see when I was actually laying out the diagram. If I just… OK here it is. This is the pattern for the violent video games and you can see that there’s like a regular shape to it; twin peaks every year. And if you look even closer - with a click - er, you can see that the peaks occur in the same months every year: November, April, November, April, November, April. It’s like ‘well why?’ November, Christmas video games come out so there’s maybe an upsurge in the concern about the content, but April? Why April? Um, and I was curious about this and I looked through and I couldn’t find any particular reason and then I came across something. Anybody know what it is? Something linked to video games. No? April 1999: the Columbine shooting. And that tragedy was linked to the influence of video games and since then there have been court cases, retrospectives, even copycat shootings that have occurred in April.
And if you look at the correlation – this was generated by a tool called Google Insights by the way; it tracks the intensity of these words – er, if you look at the correlation and the insights…that’s the correlation so: Coloumbine shootings a violent video games. These two ideas are now co-dependent, they’re co-relating. They emerge together simultaneously, except for those peaks when it’s the, I think the fifth, eighth and tenth anniversary of the Columbine shooting.
So it’s also like we’re seeing how the mind, the group mind remembers and how things get completed inter-related with one another. There’s another pattern in this as well…that you – we’ve got a good thing going on now…er there’s a gap, you see the gap on the far left where all these sort-of fears, sort-of die out. Um, and if you see where is starts, around about September 2001, when we had something very real to be sacred about.
So, hidden patterns and data just lurking there and stuff you can’t see unless you visualise it. Er…this is another…I’m going to show you another landscape. Some of you may have seen this online so if you know what this is, don’t say – I’m curious about how many people can guess. You see in this pattern, so what rises…what peaks twice a year, once around about Easter and then two weeks before Christmas? There are little mini-peaks every Monday and then flattens out in the summer. Chocolate did somebody say? You might want to get some chocolate. Any other guesses? No? Shall we see? We scraped ten thousand Facebook statuses updates for the phrase we broke up because and this was the pattern that was revealed. So as you see, an odd peak around April Fools day. People were coming out of bad weekends on the Mondays. Everyone wants to be free in the summer right? So it flattens out and then the lowest day in the year is Christmas. Who would do that? So bad. Evil!
And it’s interesting because we’re generating a sea of data every day, Facebook, Twitter, massive scads of it. And if we ask the right kind of question, if we make the right kind of enquiry, it can reveal a kind of pattern to us. There’s stuff lurking there if you make the right approach. And I think this kind of sentiment has led to this phrase you might have heard, and this sense about data that you hear about a lot these days…you might have seen…’data is the new oil’. You know, some kind of ubiquitous resource that we all sit on, that we can mine for insight and use to develop businesses.
And I kind of agree with that but I would adapt it slightly and I would say that ‘data is the new soil’ in the sense of like, for me it’s like a creative material, it’s like clay. You know, it’s something you can mould and shape and play around with a sort of have fun with essentially. And there’s so much of it, you know, what other kind of response could you have? I had some fun recently with this - you can use it to answer – look at this: Do horoscopes all just say the same thing? Well I was, you know I thought well maybe they do, maybe they don’t. Lets have a look. This is a chart I made. I scraped 22,00 horoscopes from Yahoo horoscope site. And then did word frequency analysis on them using statistical methods to find out what the most common words were. And the red words here are the only unique words for each star sign. So you can see that, at a glance, they pretty much say the same kind of thing – you can answer that question.
If I just skip past this bit because there’s a little story about how I did it but, you know we scraped 22,000 into a spreadsheet and we used some really cool online tools.
What I wanted to…fast forward…just hold there… the cool thing is you’ve got 22,000, you condense them all and you can find the 50 most common words in the whole…in all horoscopes. And then you, so you can create a meta, hyper, super prediction that applies to all horoscopes, all star-signs for every day of the year – right? So let’s see what that it.
Ready? Sure? Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love (can’t disagree with that). Friends and family matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along. Yeah! There it is! The meta-ultra-horoscope.
So, again, playing with data, scooping it together, seeing what comes out – it’s fun yeah? So…yep…so information is beautiful. That’s kind of what I feel at the moment and I wonder if I can make my life beautiful. Let me just tell you something about myself. This is my visual CV. Er…not particularly pretty actually. I don’t really like the colours now, but it gives a snapshot of my background. You know, I started off as a programmer when I was a kid. I was really into video games and I started writing video games when I was 15 or 16 and wrote about, for video games mags and then followed that trend into technology and online and that led me into mainstream journalism – I wrote for the Guardian and for Wired magazine. Er… and then I got online, internet, love it, so cool! And then I did work in advertising, which was an interesting experience. It’s a great…it’s actually…advertising has long known the power of the visual image and a little bit of text, which is – bleeds a lot into my work.
And then, only recently have I been a designer. Can we just flip back… thank you. Only recently have I sort of, become a designer and I’ve never trained in design, I’ve never been to art school. I’ve got no design training whatsoever. I’m more of a journalist I would say, and a writer. And it was a curious thing happened when I started designing this kind of stuff. I just…I always…well yeah, I felt like I already knew how to design. I was already…not that I was immediately good at it but I understood the rules of space and typography and colour. I had some sense of that already. And it feels like, I had that because I’d been exposed to all this media in my career, and it’s kind of been absorbed. I’ve absorbed it in. And I don’t really feel like I’m unique in that sense any more. I feel like we’re all doing that. We’re all becoming more visually literate, more design literate. Because we’re all looking at the internet every day and the internet is the fusion, the ultimate fusion of information design. It’s making us think of information in design terms and it’s allowing us to see information… no, see design as information. So there’s a merging going on there. We’re all visualisers now.
So if we just switch to the next… and this chimes with some cognitive stuff as well I think as well like, our eyes are exquisitely sensitive to variations in colour and shape and pattern. We’re always looking for connections, we’re always looking for patterns. And this is the kind of language of the eye. Um, you know if I show you another image you’re sort of instinctively looking for patterns when you’re looking at this stuff. You’re hovering. So this is your... this is how your eye connects. And if you combine the language of the eye - colour, shape, pattern and space – with the language of the mind, which is concepts, numbers, ideas, you maybe can reach a level where you can speak two languages simultaneously. So you’re speaking to the eye and the mind simultaneously, each enhancing the other.
Let me show you what I mean – just click on here. This is a little graphic that I did about the state of the current telecoms industry. It’s like, basically everyone’s suing everyone else. It’s just a complete…a frenzy. Um, but there’s two things going on here. There’s a cognitive, kind of mental story and there’s a visual kind of layer as well. Let me explain it to you. So the bubbles here just explain why things are being…um, who’s suing who – the reasons why. So we can strip those out. And here, the size of the boxes correspond to the revenue of each company. And the colour of the box, red means decreasing revenue and black means increasing revenue.
So we strip just the company names away. Now your eye is able to answer two very specific questions. Is there a relationship between litigiousness and decreasing revenue? Is there a relationship between size of company and litigiousness? And this you can answer just by looking at this pattern. So the visual layer is active and then you’ve got another layer on top and another layer on top. So - two languages speaking at the same time.
Er, this is a really bad word and I’m embarrassed and it’s not going to catch on but I felt like I…I couldn’t think of any…Infotography – terrible! I was speaking to a guy at Google and he was really…he really inspired me because he said he thought data visualisation and information design was the new form of photo journalism. It’s like, instead of sending a reporter to the, you know the war zone, you’re sending a reporter into data, into the seas of data and oceans of data that are surrounding us and they come back with stories and reportage and new ways of looking at things. And that kind of…well obviously it made my task sound quite romantic but you know, I was quite enthused by this and I thought you can actually use a photographic metaphor when you’re exploring this form.
So let me show you what I mean. So…um you can take a wide view, you can go up…almost satellite image. You can take a satellite photo of a subject, not of a place but of a subject. Here, I was curious about, when we had the BNP thing going on…um I mean its still going on but you know, when it was in the mainstream press, areas of high BNP membership in the UK and then areas of large non-white populations. So I was curious: is there a correspondence? What happens if you overlay these? What pattern is revealed? So we did do that – simple visual technique using colour.
And you get some surprises, some non-surprises: West Yorkshire, obviously lots of racial tension there. But then: Eastbourne, Swindon, Essex… these places – you know, unusual…the beginnings of an investigation maybe or a question. And then you get this pattern also where you see areas of high BNP membership around areas of non-white populations and what is that? Is that ‘white flight’? Is that people outside looking in? Again, this is not a pattern you can necessarily see on a spreadsheet. It’s something you have to kind-of zoom out to see – visualise.
And I think, the most popular search terms in the world…the US, the united search terms of America if you like…er, again a quite a boring data set but visualised and taken in a wide view, it becomes an interesting landscape that you can explore with your eyes – spotting patterns, looking for patterns, seeing little anomalies. So you can go wide or I think you can also zoom in. So you can take a little stat, you get a whole Twitter world. You take a little bit of data and you kind of zoom into it to see a new perspective. The data is about six months old so it may not be entirely accurate but it gives a different kind of snap shot and it changes your perception slightly as to the nature of that network.
Another zoom in, I think – oh yeah, this Clay Shirky, Nick mentioned him. This idea of the cognitive surplus, this sea of minds waiting for a great task to unite...to…for that. So he had this great statistic that I saw in one of his talks. We spend 200 billion hours in the US watching TV and then it takes just 100 million hours – it took just 100 million hours to build Wikipedia and it’s like WOAH! A little zoom in. But what’s curious about this and this is a really…when I went to do this…I saw this stat and I thought I’m going to visualise this… I did a little sketch – now if you just flick - Oh you can’t really see. Sorry about that. But you can see how I imagined 2 billion I imagined as this. And 100 million I imagined as that size in my mind. Your mind cannot imagine scale very well. And it’s really… it chilled me a little bit because I thought ‘God, I really thought that was a lot’.
Let's just look at the final version again. And now 100 million is a really interesting number. You will hear this number sent out by politicians all the time. Obama used it recently. He said, we’re making…um we’re going to make massive cuts to the US government spending. We’re going to cut $100 million. And $100 million, it’s like the tiniest of tiny pixels but it sounds like an enormous number. Cameron did the same thing. We’re cutting the budgets for the UK’s universities but we’re giving £100 million to, you know to support poor students. And you go ‘Oh, OK well £100 million, that sounds’…you know, your head is like ‘bonk’ but actually, compared to the £5 billion that they were cutting, it’s nothing. So, you know, whenever you hear 100 million in the press or the news just kind of, be on the alert, yeah?
OK, so zooming in. You might have seen this one: the Icelandic volcano. You know, which one is it? Is it like a disaster for the planet or a boon for the aviation industry. Lets see…er… next slide…it was emitting 150,000 tonnes a day, European aviation industry 350,000 tonnes , we grounded 60% of flights. So we saved – yeah it was the first carbon neutral volcano basically. Zoom into the data – see a little bit of the story.
OK moving on. Um…OK this hasn’t come out very well but…um…yeah…alright we’ll skip this one.
OK and what I love is, what I really love is when you apply that lens, that photojournalistic lens if you like, to invisible… invisible stuff, stuff that you can’t see or stuff that’s scattered around. This is a visualisation of evidence for dietary supplements and nutritional supplements. Again, I was frustrated – like should I be taking vitamins C, D, E, you know shots of wheatgrass, whatever. The press reporting is just conflicting all the time. So I got all the data, I literally went through thousands of studies to try and grade all the data. Created this visualisation, which is called a balloon race. So the higher up the image, the more evidence there is for a given supplement. And the size of the bubbles her corresponds to the popularity of each substance. So again, you can say visually ‘is there a correspondence between popularity and efficacy?’ immediately but also you can kind of zoom in and see a bit of, you know, you can do a sort of ‘worth it’ line. Things above this line are worth exploring or worth taking because the evidence is pretty good or it’s, you know, it’s growing. And below the line is stuff there’s stuff that the evidence is less strong, or completely non-existent. The bottom here is no evidence, slight evidence and then conflicting evidence.
So here…five minutes?...right, good…ha, thank you. So here it’s like, um…it took a huge amount of work. I had a…my book’s at the back there…and I had a 250 page book to fill in about six to eight months. And after a month – this took me a month – and after a month I’d just filled two pages! Two pages – I’d just filled two pages of my book – so annoying. But it points to like an…um…a, like a hidden quality of data visualisation is it’s ability to compress information. It’s like the MP3 of knowledge if you like, almost. You can condense a huge amount of information into a small space. And it’s readily kind of drinkable or see-able or get-able, just in an easy visual.
Um…oh yeah I was going to say I’m having trouble visualising this. Shall we do…er…five minutes? Yeah, OK let’s try it. The thing is I…this data is now curated. All the images I do I put…leave Google Docs, put in Google Docs spreasheets online. And so people can see the data. And just I’m going to leap off stage and show you what you can do if you curate the data. Thank you ... er, so this is the data live online er…here we go. And so anyone can look at it, and check it. It’s got all the studies all the rankings and everything and then the cool thing is, you can…um…yep, you can generate a sort-of Flash, a little Flash App so you can take that data and make it into interactive so now, again lives online so you can see all that stuff. And then you can filter it and say ‘just show me the stuff for cancer – show me the stuff that…er…you know plants and herbs’, so it’s kind of alive. It’s now living data and I can just update that spreadsheet and this App online instantly updates.
So whenever you’re working in this field, it’s worth really spending time curating the data because it becomes and resource you can share with just everyone really. Um…OK I’m going to pop back in to presentation land. Alright. So…um the most exciting thing I think for me is applying this approach to stuff…don’t know quite how to put it…but stuff that doesn’t really have a tangible existence. Like the way…the ideas and the way in which we shape and mould our world. Our world views, our conceptual…the conceptual realm.
So you might have seen this image online. This is a visualisation of the political spectrum - left and right. Again arising out of my personal frustration of not really understanding where things stood. So you can see how these ideas…it’s a concept map so it’s showing how the concepts drip down from government, into society and culture, into families, and then into the adults and into their beliefs and then back round again in the kind of spiral. And I love the idea of it. And I love the idea of seeing ideas but also I love…the process for doing this was quite a struggle for me because, being a sort-of journalist, a sort of left-leaning journalist, I really wanted this side of the image to be better than that side. And basically I could feel that tugging on my process as I was doing it. You know, little biased, little voices sneaking in. But I couldn’t do that I would have created a lop-sided image or a biased, you know a broken image. So part of my process had to be to kind of really get into this side of the perspectives and really honour it really, you know really sort of believe…get into it and understand it and at the same time, acknowledge how much of myself, you know uncomfortably, how much is in that side. How much I am actually this, as well as that.
And it wasn’t that uncomfortable because there was something…um… freeing about seeing ideas rather than being told them. You’re being told and someone’s expressing their view to you, it’s almost like you have to defend it. Whereas if you’re just looking at an image of ideas it’s just ‘oh – I’m just looking at an image!’ And there’s the capacity there to see what other people think or to see where they’re coming from. There’s like a clue there is the language, the potential. There’s something lightening, and kind of easing and mind expanding about seeing this kind of stuff. And that feels for me like the most exciting frontier for this field. It’s kind of applying this to this kind of stuff and opening minds and allowing people to see, and play and feel and know where other people are coming from. So I think I should probably end there. Thank you.