Have you ever wondered how often you look in the mirror? How many doorways do you walk through in a week? How many times did you say goodbye? These were just a couple of the questions authors Stefanie Posavec, and Giorgia Lupi answered about themselves while writing Dear Data.
Is this a book about data? Yes. Is it a data report, of sorts? Yes. Should you run away in fear? No! It is all too easy to write a boring data report; luckily, Dear Data is anything but that. This “report” is actually a collection of 104 postcards (two for every week), the product of a year-long collaboration between friends and old-fashioned pen pals Posavec and Lupi.
Each week, Posavec and Lupi selected a theme and then collected data throughout the week related to the chosen topic. They turned their datasets into beautifully illustrated postcards that they then mailed across the Atlantic to one another. These women had only met in person twice before they began this project, but what better way for two information designers to get to know each other?
Posavec graduated from Colorado State University but now lives in London with her husband. Her visualizations were often more simplistic than Lupi’s — she was less likely to include little additional details, and her visualizations often emphasized colors and shapes.
Lupi is the co-founder and design director of Accurat, a data-driven design firm, and a self-proclaimed data humanist. Lupi loves the details, and she incorporated many symbols into her visualizations to paint comprehensive pictures of her day-to-day life.
I immensely enjoyed this book, and it is one that I would recommend to anyone, be they a fan of exciting data insights and pretty graphs or not. This book inspired me to reconsider the dos and don’ts of data visualizations, opened my eyes to the potentials of “little data,” and introduced me to Data Humanism.
Reevaluating Data Visualizations
My data-based reports often include many lovely… bar charts, scatterplots, and line graphs. How exciting! But after reading Dear Data, I feel compelled to reconsider how I visualize data.
There’s nothing wrong with bar charts, scatterplots and line graphs when used correctly, but they can contribute to the previously mentioned dullness of data reports. This isn’t news to me, but I hadn’t considered alternatives because I honestly wasn’t sure what alternatives would look like. Now, I understand that I just lacked the ingenuity and creativity of Posavec and Lupi!
Some of my favorite visualizations included: the little icons Lupi drew to illustrate how often she used the apps on her phone, the “rainbow” visualization of Posavec’s closet, the spiderweb-like design Posavec used to illustrate a week of her public transportation use, and the “musical” score Lupi made out of her complaints one week.
Not only were these visualizations significantly more interesting to look at than “traditional” data visualizations, but they enriched the report as well — incorporating aspects of the data such as origin, flow, or appeals to the senses, which would be lost in traditional graphs and charts.
Big Data, Small Data
Most likely, you’ve heard of “Big Data” before — it’s a buzzword that is difficult to escape in the current data climate. Big data usually refers to large collections of data (as the name suggests) and is highly sought after.
Dear Data is not a book about big data by definition: the majority of the visualizations include only one week’s worth of data. That being said, there are still valuable insights (about these two women) to be drawn from these datasets. I was reminded of a quote from Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: “The size of a dataset, I believe, is frequently overrated. There is a subtle, but important, explanation for this. The bigger an effect, the fewer the number of observations necessary to see it. You only need to touch a hot stove once to realize that it’s dangerous.”
Advocating for small data isn’t to say that big data is unnecessary or useless — it’s to say that it’s sometimes over-the-top. How much data do you really need? Enough to make your point. Dear Data is evidence of the value of “small data,” and “small data” is one of the cornerstones of “data humanism.”
Data Humanism
I mentioned that Lupi is a proud “data humanist,” but it wasn’t until I was researching her for this review that I understood what that meant or how Dear Data embodied it so well. Lupi created the helpful graphic pictured below on the subject.
I have previously lamented the lack of a code of ethics for data analysts (the closest thing being the Code of Conduct of the Data Science Association), but I like these principles as a starting place for one and will proudly from this point forward identify as a data humanist.
The collection of postcards was published unedited — stamps, postage marks, stains, water damage and all. They now reside in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (That means every time Posavec laughed over a week has gone down in history, as has every time Lupi swore one week.) I hope to see them in person one day.
Meg Malone 