Research Comms Podcast: Interview with Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick
“We’re really trying to reach out to what we call the ‘data intimidated’ and ‘data uninitiated’”. Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick on their mission to visualize data in new and playful ways.
This week’s guests on the Research Comms podcast are data designer, Stefanie Posavec, and data journalist, Miriam Quick. In our conversation we talk about their new book, about how constraints can encourage creativity, and they give their tips on how researchers and communicators can improve their own data visualizations.
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The below interview has been edited for the sake of brevity and clarity.
Miriam, you’re a data journalist, can you explain what that involves, for people who are unfamiliar with the term?
[Miriam] In my regular job I do quite a diverse range of things. But the data journalism element of what I do is writing data stories.
I've written a lot for the BBC, I do a lot of research for people who make graphics and data visualisations, I work with creative agencies and information design agencies to bring the data together, analyse it, find stories in it and then present it in a way that makes sense to an audience.
I also work with designers and artists, including Stephanie. I love the work I do. It’s incredibly collaborative and I really enjoy the art-focused projects.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
How would you describe your book [‘I am a book, I am a portal to the universe’] ?
[Stephanie] The book communicates data, but rather than having charts and graphics on the page, the data is embodied in the dimensions of the book itself. That might be the weight of the book, the time it takes to turn a page, the thickness of a page, the volume of the book, the length of a page, and so on.
So every dimension, every measurement inside the book is imbued with some data point that we use to tell stories about the world and about the universe, and how great it is and how wonderful it is to live in it.
We made a complete ban on any sort of traditional charts in order to challenge ourselves to explore different ways to represent data that we might have never seen before.
Raw data might not be the first thing that comes to mind when people think of a material to create artworks. Why do you find it appealing to work with?
[Miriam] The way in which I like to work is very much driven by constraints.
For example, with this book we had a very tight set of constraints. When the book needed to communicate quantities, we had to communicate them within the dimensions of the physical book.
Personally, I really like working with tight creative rules and tight constraints because I think that it is actually quite enabling, rather than limiting. The types of art that I’m into, the type of music that I'm into is often driven by very tight rules.
[Stefanie] What's really interesting is that we both have a lot in common with the type of creative practices that we like to explore. We both like to make rule-based artwork. I find that constraints heighten my creativity more than just drawing something on a page free form.
I’ve always enjoyed rule-based creative practices. I work a lot with personal data as well, and I actually see that as being quite freeing and less rigid. I see it as a way to get to know myself better or a way of feeding my curiosity.
Stefanie, in your TEDx Talk you speak about the value of collecting and observing our own data. Why do you think it’s such a positive habit to get into?
To give some context, that TEDx Talk was about a project that I did with a designer, Giorgia Lupi, called Dear Data, where every week for a year we collected our personal data and then visualised it on a postcard to send it to the other. So we were gathering data points like how often we complained that week, or all of our friends that we saw, our wardrobes, our books, every time we laughed and so on. So it was everyday data collection, where we were using our data collection as a type of personal documentary.
Data that can be used for good, and data can be used for bad. But in this context, one of the benefits of the project is that just through the act of data collection you’re being compelled to notice a little bit more about your life, and it forces you to look at things in a different way and observe things that you might not necessarily have paid attention to otherwise, and I think that can be valuable.
I think data collection in this way should be considered as valuable as other ways of documenting and understanding our world.
What advice do you have for researchers and research communicators who want to create more compelling visualizations of their own?
[Stefanie] There are a lot of resources on the internet. ‘Visualising Data’ is probably the best website. It's a UK-based site, run by Andy Kirk, with tons of wonderful resources. And really my tip would be that maybe there are lots of different ways to visualise the data that you might be visualising now that you haven't discovered yet. There's tons of data viz, of chart catalogues and data visualization libraries online that you can use to get inspiration, to potentially find a different way of visualizing your data that might be more effective than just choosing visualizations off the peg.
It takes a little bit more care and consideration and it's all about just taking that one extra step, any way you can. It doesn't need to be ‘data art’, it could just be picking a better chart than the one that you're working with currently.
[Miriam] My advice would be to develop a questioning mindset. So if you're looking for data on the internet then being skeptical about what you read is really important. There are loads of really great open data repositories that you can use to find open data. Our World in Data is a really good place to start for global data sets on things like health and education and so on.
And they will do a lot of the work for you. But hand curating data is always a bit of a challenge. You should be going in with a questioning mindset, thinking like a scientist, coming up with a hypothesis that you want to try and disprove with what you're finding out and being skeptical about what you're really thinking about, how it was calculated.
Thinking about the methodology, thinking about the people behind the numbers, the people who actually gathered and curated that data. Because it doesn't come from nowhere. It doesn't come from God, it comes from somebody gathering it or machine gathering it in a particular way, according to a set of rules and criteria.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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