Category: workshops

Data Therapy is heading off to Brazil for a series of workshops next week!

We’re excited to announce the partnership with the government of Minas Gerais, to deliver a series of workshops and paint a mural in Belo Horizonte.

We’ve worked with our partners in the office of Strategic Priorities and put together and agenda that include multiple workshops, public lectures, and a Data Mural (with youth at the PlugMinas school)!

Know someone in Brazil?  Send them this information and see if they can join us!

Last fall Ethan Zuckerman and I were invited to co-teach a “data acquisition and visualization” module for graduate students in the MIT Comparative Media Students program.  The module was five sessions covering the following topics:

1. Data visualization, from acquisition to storytelling. Deep dive on data “shopping” – the process of acquisition and interrogation
2. Workshop on five methods of data scraping and cleaning
3. A taxonomy of visualization, and sketches of the story we want to tell with data
4. Workshop on Fusion Tables/Maps and Tableau, and lots of other tools for data visualization
5. Mapping and Unmapping, the politics of data, and presentation of student work

For session 3, I wanted to dig in on ways to sketch a data-driven story and was reminded of an activity I participated in last summer at the 2013 Info-Activism Camp.  There was a track of visual presentation workshops facilitated by Angela Morelli, Tom Halsør and Mushon Zer Aviv.  One of the activities they ran felt perfect for this class – they led an activity to create a short paper story book that sketched out the data story.  The goal was to flesh out your story before doing all the work to make a final version.

They started by folding a piece of paper in a ‘zine.  Click here for the best instructions I’ve found online.  Here’s one I made based on data about where I spent my time at the Tactical Tech Camp:

As you can see, the folding created a short book.  Writing out my data story in this low-tech way forced me to focus on the narrative structure of my data story, rather than the data details or computational options.  Even if you know you’re going to present it as a single graphic, teasing apart the narrative is a crucial step in crafting a strong story.  This hands-on sketching exercise if one of the best ways I’ve seen the do that.

So I totally copied their technique and used it in session 3 of the module I was describing earlier (thanks you all!).  The students dove right into it, drawing the concepts they saw in their own data stories.  It worked pretty well, helping them pull apart the crucial way points in their story.

At a deeper level, this activity is another one for learning data literacy and data presentation that pulls from the world of the arts.  I’m constantly trying to build the toolbox of activities that can be used for my Data Therapy workshops, and this one just got added!  I strongly believe the arts is the most fertile ground to borrow from when creating engaging data literacy activities.  My underlying motivation is to push forward a better description of my half-formed “Popular Data” concept.

Have you tried this activity?  Are there others that spring to mind?

There are a lot of people talking about “Visual Literacy” right now. Shazna Nessa shared some thoughts from a journalistic point of view on the Mozilla Source blog recently.  Her discussion focused on how data visualizers should consider the limitations and affordances of visual depictions of information.  I’d like to offer a complementary response from a constructionist’s point of view. Certainly the journalists and new explainers  need to understand how to best use the tools at hand,  but in addition we can help the “audience” build visual literacy by helping them create their own visual presentations of their information. The creative act of telling an information-based story offers everyone the best way to understand the affordances of various visualization tools, in addition to making them more aware consumers of this new “visual grammer”.  So how do you do this? What kind of fun activities can we do with people help them work with and present information.

Build a Data Sculpture

One classic technique to exploring a new domain is to re-use more familiar materials in novel ways.  For instance, in my Data Therapy workshops I show up with a bin of craft materials and give people 5 minutes to create a physical “data sculpture” that depicts a tiny set of data I share (click to see some examples).

This activity is fun, engaging, and raises many presentation issues!  Inevitably some people choose to focus on one  piece of data, while others try to show it in context.  People bring their own biases to it.  All of that makes for great fodder for the discussion I do right after each person shares what they made.

Reverse-Engineer Other People’s Work

Of course, taking stuff apart is just as much fun as building it!  Another activity that both I and my friends at  the Tactical Tech Collective us is something they call the “gallery”.  You hang up a bunch of examples of visualizations and have people move through them in groups (make sure to include examples for praise and examples for critique!).  Each group gets assigned one of these questions to answer for each piece in the gallery:

• who is the intended audience?
• what is the information being shared?
• how would this make the audience feel?
• what visual techniques does it use?
• are their any ethical or reliability issues with the presentation?

Each group writes their answers on a small sticky note that they stick under the piece, so they have the be concise. Then you let everyone wander for a bit, looking at the other groups’ responses.  The discussion afterwards is a fantastic opportunity to understand the questions one has to consider when creating visual presentations of information, and creates a shared language within the group for talking about their own work.

Remix  Other People’s Work

A great follow up to this activity is to pick one item and have people remix it (we did this at the the TTC Info-Activism Camp). What do I mean by “remix”? The idea is to take the topic and data it presents, and have a brainstorming session about how to craft an appropriate message for a specific audience:

• an online community
• people who disagree with the point
• people who agree but you want to motivate to action
• policy makers
• people within the system being depicted

We broke participants into small groups and assigned each an audience to remix for.  People sketched out ideas quickly on paper and then shared them back with the group.  This let participants exercise the reflective muscle we developed in the gallery activity.

Think about Impact

You can do more than just LEGO bricks and pipe cleaners.  If you want to focus on evidence and persuasion, the Tactical Tech Collective has a great exercise I co-faciliated recently.  They first introduce an issue and some related information (for instance, the idea of conserving water and data about water use in home, industry, food production, etc.) Then a handful of participants are brought up to represent various audiences that are involved in the issue and you might want to influence (politicians, companies, food producers, citizens).  These audiences are lined up according to how much they care about the issue.  Then the fun part – everyone proposes, off the top of their heads, arguments that try to move folks.  So people make arguments to the audience representatives, and if the arguments is persuasive the person physically moves down the line to being “more convinced”.  I found that this kind of constructive brainstorming activity brought some of the abstract ideas about “influence” into the real world, making them actionable for people when they get back to their day jobs.

Why Making?

The common thread connecting  these activities is engaging people together around the process of visually presenting information. I’ve done all these activities a few times now, and have enjoyed the results after each one. People’s insights into visual presentations they see are directly connected to their experiences of producing their own.  I worry about statements that simple presentations of information are the “right” answer… I don’t disagree that they can be effective, but we can expect more of our audiences.  I believe giving people creative opportunities to build their own visualizations for their own cause is the way to do better.

Jer Thorp, a visualization expert I respect, recently wrote that to make all this data more human 

people need to understand and experience data ownership

I completely agree.  This will address the potentially disempowering nature of data for those that don’t “speak data”.  I hope these types of activities help bridge the gap between the “new explainers” and the so-called “data illiterate”.

Cross-posted to the MIT Center for Civic Media blog.

I recently attended the 2013 Info-Activism Camp as a facilitator on the “Curation” track.  The Tactical Technology Collaborative organized the event for over 100 information activists from around the world.  Everyone was there to learn about Evidence & Influence.  Yes, it was awesome.

I’ve mostly been working on Data Therapy in isolation, because I haven’t been able to find others working on capacity building for creative data presentation with community organizations. That all changed at an isolated camp in Northern Italy a few weeks ago!  I connected with a network of technologists, activists, and rabble-rousers that were thinking deeply about this topic.

Attendees pondering which of the awesome sessions to attend after the morning circle.

What’s InfoActivism Camp?

What happens when you bring 100 information activists from around the world to a remote retreat in the north of Italy? We affectionally called it “organized chaos”.  The organizers, Tactical Tech, have been sharing best practices in information advocacy since 2003. They run events around the world, helping activists learn how to create compelling visuals that tell their stories and advocate for their causes. Their fantastic “Visualizing Information for Advocacy” guide will be coming out in extended book-form soon. They’ve done a handful of large-scale “Camp” gatherings, the last in Bangalore in 2009. It truly is camp – we all eat, sleep, play, and work together!

What is “Curation”?

The large paper encouraging people to come join our curation & influence track.

I was invited to help facilitate the “Curation” track, which focused on how to use information to sway hearts and minds. You know, the easy stuff 🙂 I was excited because this parallels my Data Therapy work so closely, so I hoped to share and learn in equal parts! I worked with my co-facilitators, Stephanie Hankey (of TTC) and Tin Geber (from the Land Coalition), to create an agenda for the week that was tailored to the participants interests.

Our framing questions.

Of course, this was just one of 4 tracks that filled the mornings. The afternoons were filled with peer-to-peer skill-shares, and hands-on labs that focused on skill building with particular tools (for visualization, digital security, data inestigation, etc).

Reflections

I found the event to be just the right mix of “organized chaos” – there was a strong skeleton that set the main areas of interest, but there was ample space to change things completely based on what was working and what people wanted to learn. This is a hard balance to strike in “emergent agendas” for events; I have been part of events that have gotten it wrong a few times. This felt different, because there was strong support and collaboration from other facilitators, and the participants too (many of whom took on faciliation duties during the week).

The groundwork was laid for many exciting collaborations, built on stiking similiraties between activists across the globe. Personally, I also came away with a great set of new activities, approaches, and examples for my Data Therapy workshops. Keep an eye on my Data Therapy blog to learn more about those, and upcoming workshops I plan to schedule.  It was a treat to directly help people again, and to be reminded that you can’t disconnect presentation from the influence you want to create.

Cross-posted to the Civic Media blog.

I recently hosted a Data Therapy session at Data Day 2013.  The Data Day event is a fantastic local gathering of people using data to drive community change in the Boston area. This year the event brought together academic researchers, policy makers, local organizations, and regular interested folks for one day of conversations about how to tell stories with data.

In addition to these types of community building efforts, the MAPC and The Boston Foundation have been building out many data-analysis and data-presentation tools to help local folks:

• Our Healthy Massachusetts
• The Boston Indicators Project
• Metro Boston Data Common
• WEAVE (Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment)

I certainly have concerns about data-based decision making in the civic sphere (see my thoughts on data as disempowerment), but I have a stronger belief in the the potential of data to influence people and drive change.

My workshop was small, so I had a chance to focus on helping people with their data presentations problems.  I reviewed some case-studies of various techniques, and a process, to build a shared language around data presentation.  Then we broke out into groups to brainstorm possible solutions for people’s actual data presentation needs!

In my Data Therapy workshops I focus on redefining what “data visualization” means.  Most people think of complicated pictures with dots and lines, or snappy info-graphics with big numbers.  I argue that more informal data presentation can help you engage your audience in the data story you are telling.  Towards that goal, I show up to workshops with a big box of craft materials – LEGOs, pipe cleaners, and more!

Here are some pictures from last night’s NetSquared meetup.  I showed people a little bit of the data from the Somerville Happiness Survey.  Then I paired them up and gave them 5 minutes to turn the craft materials into a presentation of data. This activity serves as a great ice-breaker, and resets the boundaries of what counts as a data presentation.  More importantly, it’s fun. Let me know if you have ideas about other activities that I could use!