Data Skills

Viennese artist Michael Marcovici’s Rat Traders uses reward, punishment and selective breeding to create a strain of lab-rat that can predict the movement of international currency markets.

The rats are kept in Skinner boxes, and are trained by playing them piano scores whose pitch reflects actual historical currency market fluctuations; when the music ends, each rat chooses a door, one representing a long position, the other a short one. If they correctly anticipate the market, they’re given food; for incorrect predictions they get a shock. The most successful rats are bred to produce new generations.

The outcome is a group of rats that can predict USD/EUR market movement with 53% accuracy.

Or, possibly, the result is a bunch of credulous posts like this one, accepting the reality of the experiment without much evidence, but producing an attention-bubble that says that high-flying finance operatives underperform relative to lightly trained rats, which is also a useful contribution to the literature, albeit not the scientific literature.

In any event, Skinnerian training doesn’t usually involve punishment for undesirable behaviors; the point of “positive reinforcement” is to reward “good” behaviors and ignore everything else.

here’s my original tweet here

if i right click and click “inspect element” on chrome and find the line that says my actual tweet like so

and select that line, right click, and click “edit as html”

I can type in whatever i want like this

and like that i can make a screenshot that says that i like to eat children and use it to call myself out

Clay Shirky has some some truths: “Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide ‘Click to buy’ is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.”

The other significant point is that journalists are being kept deliberately in the dark about the fortunes of their employers. When asked to estimate their own circulation, they overestimate it by an order of magnitude. It’s the sharp between the newsroom and the business side: “

7E Guest Artist Stefanie Posavec

Stefanie Posavec is an London-based data artist with an MA in Communication Design (Central Saint Martins).  With a background in book design and text visualisation, she works as a designer with a focus on data-related design, with work ranging from data visualization and information design. She is commissioned for data art and data illustration for a variety of clients. Her personal work focuses on the visual representation of language, literature, or numbers and has been exhibited internationally.

Check out her site. We love her book art.  

By Jeremy Lin

The style guide is your friend, not your enemy

When I first started designing data visualizations for the Tribune, I felt like I was on the style guide struggle bus hardcore.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that our style guide is strict by any means, it’s just that I’d only had experience designing for school assignments and side projects. I was not used to having these “restrictions.”

However, very soon I realized it’s exactly these restrictions that enable me to refine my thinking in graphical elements: typefaces, colors, forms, empty space, visual hierarchy. These elements aren’t only there to create a beautiful design; how they’re designed is also key to how we tell a story with the data.

I learned to think critically in my design process. Looking pretty isn’t good enough. How to present information in the most effective way should always be a journalist-designer/journalist-developer’s first priority.

In the story about solar energy production for the 31 Days, 31 Ways series, I designed a few different versions and went back and forth for editing. Finally, I came up with a design that was true to myself as well as to the Tribune. I can’t express how much I learned in the process of redesigning and polishing this chart.

Editing and interviewing data are important, even for graphics

The web provides us (arguably) infinite space for content. But it’s also because of this seemingly infinite space that having a visual hierarchy is as important as ever. Instead of visualizing the whole data set without any editing and data manipulation, I learned how to prioritize the most important information, and the not-so-important, secondary stuff I want to present to our readers.

Also, I learned to always design with a story in mind. I always have some questions written down for the data set I am working on to help me “interview” the data. If the data set I’m working with can’t answer my questions, sometimes I would even join and compare that data with other data sets.

In the 31 Days, 31 Ways story about people who’ve purchased health plans on the federal marketplace, I wanted to find out the correlation between income, location and the number of people who’d enrolled. I joined four data sets: marketplace enrollment, total population, median household income from the American Community Survey and geospatial data. After some data wrangling and normalization, I created a series of choropleth maps that enable readers to quickly compare the percentage of healthcare enrollment and median household income in different ZIP codes.

Rethink interactions and visual design

As a journalist-turned-designer-turned-developer, sometimes I got excited about the design/computational aspects of a graphic and fell into the trap of abusing complicated visual forms and mouse interactions. But working at the Tribune has taught me to restrain myself and focus on really nailing down the design and visual presentation.

Because every time a reader needs to actively “work” to interpret a graphic, the more they will get distracted from seeing the bigger story of the graphic. On top of that, mouse interactions never really translate well on mobile.

In the freestanding emergency room story, I decided to experiment with minimal interaction. Instead of having a play button or having five buttons representing different years for readers to select from, I created a GIF-like map with automatic looping and animation effect. This way, readers can easily understand the story without having to conquer a steep learning curve or being interrupted by unnecessary interactions.

It’s OK to have fun in your design

At the Tribune, I also started to experiment with illustrations – a field that I had zero experience in. There are so many things that are important but also entirely boring to a lot of people.  In order to reach a larger audience, it’s my job as a graphic journalist to make things interesting. (With the right story, of course.)

In the story about how the Texas legislature eliminated license fees for some professions, I added a bunch of hand-drawn illustrations and icons into the table. Are these illustrations necessary for the story? Probably not. Does these illustrations add some flavor into the story? YAAAAAAAASS.

The rule of ask/don’t ask questions

Problem solving is the essence of programming. You break a big problem into small little problems, and then break these small little problems into tiny problems that you can easily solve. Of course, sometimes I still get stuck and need help from falling into the abyss of obsession over one problem. But before I turn my head to other coding gurus on our team, I always search on Google, Stack Overflow and Block Explorer first! Sometimes I feel like I even learn more from searching for the answer and teaching myself than relying on others to solve my problems.