things change when you have children

I just watched a video of a short chat between Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds about creativity and story. In it, Garr talks briefly about how having children has influenced his view and approach: "Things change when you have children."



Yes, they do.

And will continue to for me, as my husband and I are excitedly expecting baby #2 this summer!

(When you've got one who is this cute, how can you help but do it again?!?)

"animation" with power point

Let me begin this post by stating clearly that the only types of animation in Power Point (or substitute your presentation application of choice) that I endorse are: appear, disappear, and (sparingly) transparency. Please steer clear of any bouncing, flying, or fading in/out (as well as any other "slick" animations by which you may be tempted). To use an analogy, flashy animation is to presentation software as 3D is to a graph: unnecessary at best, and distracting at worst.

But that's slightly off topic. Today, I want to show you how you can use Excel and Power Point together with some simple screencasting with QuickTime Player to simulate a fully animated video.

When I solicited examples for a recent workshop, one participant sent me a graph they had created, along with this explanation:

This graphic summarized the key finding of the LAC (Latin America & Caribbean) middle class flagship we just launched. It is clearly not difficult to understand but my frustration was knowing that it could be more effective as an animated chart that could tell in a few seconds how far LAC has come. I tried to no avail to find someone who could do it for us. At the end, The Economist did what I would have liked to have done for our launch (link). 

Could we have done this ourselves? Or who could have done this for us and for how much? What kind of skills are required?

General consensus when I asked around was that The Economist's version was probably done using D3. I don't have any experience with this, and when I read the first part of the summary on the site ("D3 allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document." ...that's a mouthful!), my inclination to use tools more familiar to my audience was confirmed.

What I'll show you here should probably be considered a brute-force approach. There are certainly more eloquent solutions out there, but in case you aren't familiar with those (or don't have time or interest to learn the tools that would allow for them), this is a workable solution using good old Excel and Power Point, together with QuickTime Player.

My approach was to build the final graph in Excel, and then make a number of copies of it, eliminating some of the data elements from each so that I could focus on one component at a time to tell the story. Then I copied and pasted each of these into Power Point (making sure the visual was in exactly the same place on each slide). I pasted onto separate slides, so you see the progression as you move through them. You could also do this on a single slide with animation in Power Point (appear/disappear), which just takes a little more time and patience to set up. Patience is key throughout this process - it's a little painstaking to set up, but in the end I think achieves the desired result. Finally, after my slides were created, I used QuickTime Player to record my computer screen and voice.

Here's my resulting video:



The Excel file used to create the graphs can be downloaded here.
The Power Point file used to create the video above can be downloaded here.

This was my first time using QuickTime Player to create a screencast. I found it to be pretty straightforward; the instructions I followed can be found here.

Note how you could use this same approach in Power Point to focus your audience's attention in a live presentation as well.

klevr.org interview

Miguel Barbosa describes what he does at klevr.org as "exploring the world through conversations with interesting people". So I was honored when he reached out to talk with me on the topic of storytelling with data. Click below to watch the interview (it may take a few seconds to load):



The original posting of this interview on klevr.org can be found here. For more on the topic of data visualization, be sure to check out Miguel's interviews with Alberto Cairo (The Functional Art) and Amanda Cox (NYT).

To learn more in person, sign up for one of my upcoming workshops!

gorgeous art made from DATA

You know that when even your recently-graduated-from-college brother is talking about a TED talk on data visualization that it's going to be good. It's taken me an embarrassingly long time to watch this. But I'm glad that I finally did.

Aaron Koblin's flight patterns visual is breathtaking to watch by itself; hearing his description of the project and what jumps out to him in the resulting visual is intriguing. His other projects are equally engaging. I believe also that this is good demonstration of the value of narration on motion graphics - the context that would otherwise be missing is often what makes the visual truly compelling. The burst in Amsterdam text traffic wouldn't mean as much if you didn't know it was new years. Also, who knew collecting drawn sheep could be so interesting? Guess you'll have to watch (if you haven't already) to find out what I'm talking about.

Nat, if you're reading this - you'll enjoy Le Petit Prince reference.

JR and Jill, if you're reading - you'll be interested in the Johnny Cash Project

Enjoy!

storytelling with data: don't eat farmed fish

I spotted the following video at one of my favorite blogs, FlowingData. I consider it a great example of storytelling with data: straightforward, no extraneous information, attention-grabbing without being overly flashy, moderate use of stats to back up key points.


Eating Fish from Nigel Upchurch on Vimeo.

Personally, I avoid farmed fish on the basis of their health profile. The video calls out other fish, but farmed salmon are also often fed grains, rendering the fish fattier yet with a lower level of healthy omega-3 fats than their wild counterparts (farming also introduces things like antibiotics and pesticides that I'd rather not consume). As the video points out, there are sustainability concerns as well.

the joy of stats

The Joy of Stats has been on my to watch list for a couple of weeks. It's a 60-minute program with Hans Rosling, an animated and passionate Swedish global health professor, founder of Gapminder, and one of my favorite data storytellers.

In the segment, Rosling shares his obsession with stats. It includes clips from some of his lectures and TED talks. The stats overview was fairly basic (averages, variance, distributions, correlations), but the hour was entertaining and fact-filled. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Crimespotting by Stamen Design for showing the relationship between topography and crime: it's making citizens more powerful by arming them with information so they can hold officials more accountable.
• Florence Nightingale's polar area graph for showing the magnitude of deaths from preventable diseases contracted in the hospital, which led to a revolution in hospital hygiene.
• David McCandless' Billion Pound-O-Gram for understanding the relative sizes of the really big numbers reported by the news and government.
• Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar's We Feel Fine project (an "exploration of human emotion on a global scale") for uncovering trends in how people are feeling.

Though I found it a little overly glitzy at points, Hans Rosling was entertaining as always and I found myself glued to my computer throughout to see what he would do or talk about next.

If you haven't seen Rosling in action before, or want to get a better sense of what to expect, check out the following short clip from the program:

Why are these sessions so good? In addition to the creative use of data visuals to support his claims, Rosling's enthusiasm as he tells stories with data is both entertaining and contagious. Makes you wish you had visuals in real space, right? (Ok, that part might have been a little over the top.)

Side note: my personal opinion is that motion graphics (like the bubble charts used in many of the talks, which can be created via a gadget in Google Spreadsheets known as Motion Charts) need to have somebody there to talk through them and help the audience understand what to pay attention to for them to be effective. Hans Rosling is masterful at this.

"If the story in the numbers is told by a beautiful and clever image, then everyone understands." - Hans Rosling, The Joy of Stats