“Visualising big data” - Christopher Osborne at Hacks/Hackers London

Yesterday I blogged my notes from my colleague Laura Oliver’s talk about news community management at Hacks/Hackers London. The other talk at last week’s event was from Christopher Osborne of ITO World, about visualising big data.

Christopher made it quite clear that visualising data should serve a purpose - “we are at peak infographic” he said.

“The coffee table infographic world is really red hot right now. Nobody cares, apart from if you want something for your coffee table.”

Instead Christopher wanted to concentrate on data graphics with a purpose, and to that end showed the way that crowd-sourced mapping of the disaster zone in the recent Haiti quake had enabled search-and-rescue missions and saved lives. He wrote about it for the Guardian - “Mapping a crisis”

The Haiti mission had roots in the Open Streetmap project, and Christopher showed a time-lapse movie of the mapping of London. It starts with “one strange guy” relentlessly mapping his local area, and then begins to blossom into a fully comprehensive map of the capital.

Another stunning visualisation Christopher shared with us was the way that European airspace had been affected by the volcanic ash cloud last year. Not only was the image of thousands of flights over Europe ceasing and then restarting interesting in itself, it was coupled with a meter estimating how many tonnes of CO2 emissions had been saved during the enforced shut-down of commercial air travel.

Christopher was somewhat disparaging of data fetishists. He argued that an attitude of “Lets make some websites with lots of data” gets you nowhere since “ordinary people don’t give a shit” for data, they want “stories”

I did think there was a paradox at the heart of Christopher’s argument. There is no doubt, as Scott Byrne-Fraser and Alastair Dant have said before about dataviz at Hacks/Hackers events, that the story-telling needs to be more important than the aesthetic appeal of the graphics. Yet, inevitably, the demos that drew the most gasps and admiration from the Hacks/Hackers crowd were the most visually stunning ones.

After the talk in the Q&A session, there was an interesting exchange with Guardian data journalist, James Ball. One of the examples Christopher had used in his talk were some plain top ten tables he had produced for the Daily Mail, listing the most dangerous streets in the UK according to crime statistics. James tried to press him on the ethics of supplying that data to the press, when the underlying methodology of collection turned out to be flawed, as ruthlessly exposed by The Telegraph’s Conrad Quilty-Harper. Christopher argued that the responsibility for checking the data lay with the commissioner and the journalist, not with the chart-maker. I think it would be fair to say that there was quite a difference of opinion in the room on that - and that many journalists would assume that the data checking would be done by the data experts.

I thought Christopher was a fascinating example of the kind of roles digital journalism is enabling. He opened his talk by saying that he had wanted to be a writer, but there was no money in it, and then he got into computers. It does seem to be the case at the moment that “interest in journalism and media” + “ability with computers” = “opportunity”.

And Christopher’s best line?

“It is quite scary being emailed by Tim Berners-Lee. It is like an email from God basically.”