A Data Point Walks Into a Bar: How cold data can make you feel things.

Presented at 33C3 (2016), Dec. 27, 2016, 6:15 p.m. (30 minutes).

tl;dr: Mother Teresa said "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." I'll present ways that make us act when looking at the mass.

Remember when we thought that data would solve all our problems? Ah, the good old days. We thought we finally found all the important problems. And all the right answers. We just forgot one important thing: The audience of data is very often....people. Irrational people. People who didn't care if Trump lied or not in the Election Year of 2016. People who know that "millions of people starve in Africa", but who want to donate for that one hungry child in Norway they saw in a TV documentary. People who read about a portfolio company and then think the whole night about becoming a farmer in Chile, like the main character of their favourite book.

Stories stick, but data doesn't. Stories stick because they make us feel something; and we remember situations in which we felt intense feelings. Stories make us act; they change our beliefs. Stories make us feel warm and empathic and alive. Data doesn't make us feel anything on it’s own. Data is cold.

And still, I love data, and I love to work with it. Can we create feelings with data? Away from the beaten paths of company dashboards, scientific plots and newspaper graphics? I believe it's possible. In my talk, I will showcase some ways to present data so that it sticks and makes you feel things. We'll talk about the status quo of data presentation and where we still need to go. If you like data and want to look at more of it, you should come by.


Presenters:

  • Lisa Charlotte Rost
    Lisa loves to design data visualizations, currently as a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow at the National Public Radio in Washington, DC. Meaning, she creates graphics for the NPR website, but also goes to conferences like this one and posts on her blog or on Twitter about data-viz related things. Back in Berlin she designed for/with OpenDataCity, SPIEGEL & Tagesspiegel, taught data viz at universities and organized the Data Viz Meetup.

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