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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-12-14
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dskNubEgzCk
I am a data artists I work to transform numbers into arts and that art helps people engage with information I work with experts in many different fields and that is awesome sometimes the collaborative process can begin like a bad joke a journalist and a date artist walk into a bar and the journalist says she wants to convey how important it is that massive amounts of dairy
farm manure stays out of our drinking water at this point my slide my water to the side I am just drinking beer she says in brown county Wisconsin there is on average a half scowl for every acre of agricultural land no I think in pictures so I'm envisioning this landscape dotted with household steams but I wonder how much waste does each produce I look it up
sixty five pounds of manure in one day I remember thinking yes I that's a lot of manure but I'm not exactly sure how much it's hard to visualize now maybe it was the beer but the numbers sparked my imagination what if I had people stand next to it like this life size half Carol standing on whatever sixty five pounds of minoris now as an artist this
is a big job of a life size half cow is a challenge but when you have a big challenge you want to use your best tools so I used my computer three saws an angle grinder and my vision as a sculptor and ms brown as we call her emerge from the wood chips and went on to tour seven cities raising awareness on water quality issues we
have data visualization down to a science when I would argue someday don't require more humanity a reflection on the memories emotions and sensory experiences that make us human graphs and charts are great for some data but we have an increasing need to integrate many types of data to enable new insights so my touch on the following three data challenges grabbing attention making the abstract tangible and
tackling complexity I'm here to as humans we need to use our best tools to address these challenges so number one I could draw on a map where the threatened sage grouse lives or I could show you hundreds of images where it lives and help us reflect on the human impact on its habitat I could tell you that one in three wells in the state of Wisconsin
has detectable levels of pesticide herbicide or evoke your memory of approaching a faucet in the sculpture the middle third being black wallet what that's toxic when you first cut into it when we are awash in information every single day these powerful tools are memories emotions and senses can help us pause to think more deeply about an issue we decide to care about related to the challenge
of grabbing attention is number two making the abstract tangible one thousand two hundred seventy five people responded to the survey prompt what is a fake piece of hair worn by a man most said to pay way hairpiece rug and all the responses are represented by different colors and patterns here no sure only one person said kudi garage into one person one person said as I be
some is bought my favorite sky piece I celebrated with feet comb over inspired pattern you see at the bottom now you see it as typical charts don't let you explore it is statistically insignificant but in this case they were hilarious and they help highlight our human tool of humor and how enjoyable it can be to use what words were used only by female Victorian authors are
only by a male Victorian offers I could show you the list or I could show you well here's three words from the list com fits is that this is from the field female list conference is a sugar coated Victorian term %HESITATION treat or I could transform the results through three D. printing into a Victorian inkwell a metaphor that illuminates the different wells of words these men
or women drew from and help us reflect on why how southern was William Faulkner eighty three percent based on running Faulkner's works against southern words in the dictionary of American regional English no most surprising was just how bad a computer was at identifying southern regionalism is only about five percent correct so the human component is celebrated in this work a collection of his works in a
book when opened eighty three percent reveals a portrait of the author this art and research walks the line between culture and data in a way that challenges us and I see my art as kind of sketches in how we relate to information but they also feel my imagination regarding how we can engage with information in the future and this brings us to number three complexity a
challenge require in our most advanced tools in my field of digital humanities we take the most beautiful works of human expression and turn them into numbers to help us answer questions so for example Charles Dickens died halfway through writing the mystery of Edwin true we analyzed all of Dickens other works in an attempt to predict as much as we could about the missing chapters everyone wants
to know who did it right well we had a steamer trunk full of data word length character count gender analysis and much more but very little that would satisfy a mystery lover now maybe if we could have integrated more of these bits and pieces of data could have brought us a bit closer but it's a big challenge a common challenge today multiple streams of data related
but separate and we are missing the big compelling story in health care how can we help children with type one diabetes and their families makes sense of three sources of data so carbohydrates those other meals with insulin doses and they help keep their blood glucose levels from getting too high or too low we humans are uniquely playful another great tool so I sought inspiration from games
I combining the data into one landscape so clouds are carbohydrates the landscape is an area graph of blood glucose with red at dangerously high or low levels and then a stream of insulin dosing runs beneath all the numbers are visually represented here and the goal is simple a rolling green landscape by combining the data into one landscape it's easier to integrate the three types of data
and we can see how one affects another in a calendar citing families can make sense of daily or weekly trans I grew up reading physical landscapes trapping golfers in North Dakota animals leave a wealth of data in their environments so this picture the feathers on the animal tracks tell a story of a bird grabbing its prey and lifting off about a decade ago I interviewed an
old trapper he said something that caught my attention I would only set traps for male make eyes at how could you tell they were male he said their tracks were slightly larger and he went on to note that their tracks could indicate an animal's maturity how fast they were going where they were likely coming from or going to based on food or water in the area
clues on timing of movement and more we are all here today because our ancestors mastered this tool the ability to read all these points of information data in a three D. environment and synthesize information to form a full compelling story now what if that animal where financial markets or human health these examples are also part of complex data landscapes while we're good at identifying important data
we tend to separated out separate grass and then we miss the big picture can you imagine if we did that with animal tracks I mean sure we could identify the species but all those other details I mentioned would be lost without context and make don't believe symbols are colors on an X. Y. axis the state's mental energy to keep straight we can interpret data left by
the mink because we know what it means looks like moves like and the ground the physical world is our framework for interpretation but we could really use any familiar framework to help us engage with data I describe data in landscapes but they insist on objects as well for generations master stone workers are woodworkers have carefully read three D. information on the surface of a stone or
a piece of wood and they rely on that information to precisely cut strike or cleave that unique raw material into their vision and their art is a testament to this remarkable human tool one obvious challenges we've never been able to create high resolution data objects or data landscapes quickly or an expensively virtual reality could change this I describe word cake as kind word clouds on steroids
because it helps to see how high frequency words are trending over multiple tax overtime so each ring is a tax and here we see the presidential state of the union speeches from Reagan through Obama the idea is what is central is central so the highest frequency word is people in the center of this tunnel its use seventy two times by Bill Clinton in nineteen ninety five
so they're just forked the word to highlight every instance of it over time can use a knife to highlight one slice of it this is a rich cake and standing in the middle of word cake is a surreal experience but somewhat grounded in metaphor there are as many different ways to engage with information as there are metaphors or physical interactions in our world our computer interfaces
are heavily influenced by print culture and rely on flat surfaces so in my research I could compare two versions of attacks like this on a screen or I could hold the five versions of the Gettysburg address in my hand we're identical sections attract and differences repel in three D. it's a simple elegant display no colds are symbols to interpret okay but it's way too much work
to make now in virtual reality we could instantly compared dozens or hundreds of texts or genomes in this manner this point on the spectrum of object inspired but digitally rendered allows for interaction selection context and comparison where I believe the future of innovation lies all went on why this is important if we can present data in a new way perhaps we attract new perspectives and new
minds that think a bit differently and that's sparks innovative ideas maybe a visual learner who struggled through Shakespeare in school sees visualizations of character activity throughout hamlet and finds it intriguing powder now she's reading Shakespeare again asking exciting new questions our relationship was data is more than science or numbers we're human we desire landscapes to explore we desire objects to examine we desire handles for grasping
