My friend Andy Kirk joins the show to reflect on the changing landscape of data visualization. We discuss the evolution of tools like Tableau and Flourish, the dispersion of social media communities, and how, how AI is reshaping workflows and data visualization. Andy shares insights from his freelance experience, the challenges of teaching data preparation, and his measured take on critique and awards in the field. This episode captures a moment of introspection in data viz—where progress is evident, but big questions remain.
Resources
Check out Andy’s website and grab his new book, Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design.
Guest Bio
Andy Kirk is an independent data visualisation expert, currently based in the UK, and primarily working as a data visualisation design consultant and prolific trainer. I am a sought-after speaker, a four-times published author, and host of the ‘Explore Explain’ video and podcast series. I’ve had over a decade of experience as an adjunct lecturer positions teaching data visualisation modules on Masters programmes at a range of esteemed institutes and maintain academic activity through involvement as an external consultant on various research projects.
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Transcript
00:02.52
Jon
There he is. Look at that good looking guy. yeah there’s no There’s Noah behind you. Sorry. you’ve got you’ve got your infi it even knows You’ve got your information’s beautiful trophies above you.
00:11.36
Andy Kirk
Oh, you mean me?
00:15.46
Jon
You’ve got your big data viz neon sign.
00:16.99
Andy Kirk
Well, you know what with us, right? so
00:20.00
Jon
Yeah.
00:20.50
Andy Kirk
they’re the victorious trophies from 2015 and 2016. And the question is, at what point is a trophy no longer badge of honor?
00:30.42
Jon
Does it have like, does it have an expiration date on it?
00:32.99
Andy Kirk
yeah exactly. You know, this is now, God, has he still got those up?
00:33.79
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
00:36.19
Andy Kirk
You know?
00:37.80
Jon
Well, there is, there is. So like, no, so now it’s like the, the data viz society. ah It’s like, it’s like data viz society awards brought to you by information is beautiful, or maybe it’s the other way around.
00:48.62
Andy Kirk
oh
00:49.25
Jon
i don’t know. So ah those are like, um those have value now. That’s like, you know, the matchbox car that only there’s only like six of them. That’s, that’s what you’ve got.
00:58.80
Andy Kirk
Well, there you go. We’ll see. For now, they stay.
01:01.21
Jon
How are things? How are things?
01:02.77
Andy Kirk
ah Very good, mate. Thank you. Yeah, all good.
01:04.58
Jon
Yeah.
01:04.61
Andy Kirk
um Busy, which is never something I take for granted, even after, whatever, 15 years-ish, I think, freelancing.
01:13.25
Jon
Yeah.
01:13.53
Andy Kirk
But… um I still wake up every day thinking this could be the like then the last day where I’m in demand but I don’t take that for granted, especially in the context that I do know that there’s a ah general market slight slowdown, little dip in the road right now that I know that there’s a few people experiencing so I’m i’m very sort of aware of that um but kind of privilege to still be still be busy and still be busy in lots of different things which means I keep
01:18.52
Jon
Yeah.
01:30.06
Jon
yeah
01:43.08
Andy Kirk
you know, stimulated because they’re they’re all different things, but they all sort of fit into the same central premise.
01:44.72
Jon
Yeah.
01:48.31
Andy Kirk
So can’t complain.
01:50.57
Jon
Yeah. ah Yeah. You seem busy. I got your newsletter this morning. ah That’s always fun to get. You’ve got a new book out or a new edition of of the book.
01:58.72
Andy Kirk
Yep.
01:58.97
Jon
A lot of stuff going on. i want i do want to talk about the book, but um I want to, we we talked a few, what is a couple months ago now on your podcast.
02:06.86
Andy Kirk
Hmm.
02:07.20
Jon
I think maybe a couple months ago.
02:07.48
Andy Kirk
Hmm.
02:09.85
Jon
um I wanted to get your sense of where things are in the field. Like what’s ah what’s the state of data viz? Social media is sort of dispersed now. So that’s changed the nature, I think, of of conversation and debate.
02:24.24
Jon
Like how are you feeling these days about data viz sort of generally?
02:30.03
Andy Kirk
i think I think we’re at a very interesting junction and and I guess that kind of slightly caveated phrase means that I don’t quite know if this junction going forward is is all going to be rosy, you know, the golden past still ahead, or if we’ve just reached a point of, I don’t think it’s saturation or or like full maturity, but there’s certainly something going on whereby maybe a lot of the things that we were having discourse around and ah wondering about when will this be solved in the early 2010s, maybe a lot of that stuff has just been boxed off.
02:48.91
Jon
Right. Yeah.
03:11.89
Jon
yeah
03:12.02
Andy Kirk
You know, so, you know, things like the the maturity of certain tools, you know, we’ve talked about use of things like Flourish and Data Wrapper in that podcast that you mentioned.
03:20.21
Jon
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
03:20.46
Andy Kirk
And, you know, those tools are alongside all the others, you know, the the the power behind the Tableau of the world. They’ve really given people such a powerful means to create more things that they wish to create and with
03:35.34
Jon
e
03:39.83
Andy Kirk
you know, pretty good practices as the underpinning of how they’re, you know, organized, albeit, you know, still loads of room for creativity and and modifying. But it does feel to me that um there is, you know, there’s there’s ah there’s an excellence in the data viz field in terms of the diversity, the the talent, the the energy that’s still there.
04:05.58
Andy Kirk
I think the fragmentation through social media is a big issue. it feels like we’ve got a partial view.
04:10.11
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
04:11.54
Andy Kirk
We’ve got a partial jigsaw puzzle and it’s hard to know ah where the patterns are. It’s hard to know where all these things join together. It feels like we’ve got a bunch of kind of archipelagos of people, you know, there’s a little kind of emerging community on blue sky. Then you’ve still got some, some Twitter people. You’ve still got the kind of LinkedIn, but it’s a bit more, here’s what I’ve done. Here’s what I’ve achieved.
04:33.66
Jon
yeah
04:33.77
Andy Kirk
um Congrats to me sort of thing. um there’s The Instagram, the cool stuff, but,
04:36.06
Jon
yeah
04:39.31
Andy Kirk
It’s hard to sort of piece all that together into a cohesive picture of what’s going on right now and and who’s in there. But it still feels, i mean, it’s easy for me and us to say because we’re inside it.
04:51.44
Andy Kirk
It still feels just from the anecdotes of working with people who are in normal organizations doing this, you know not part of the field, but doing data viz, that there’s still a ah huge way to go.
05:04.77
Andy Kirk
before anyone can say, yeah, we’ve we’ve nailed that. We’ve mastered data viz as a practice internally. But perhaps with all these tools and with all these references, all these books that we’ve all written, maybe there’s a sense now that they don’t need as much help from outside, that maybe people inside can solve these things.
05:19.89
Jon
yeah
05:24.43
Andy Kirk
um But then, you know, the question that we always ask is, so what’s its what’s what’s the difference it’s making? What’s what’s the effect it’s having? and that to a certain degree beyond the public stuff, news media, for example, that is the stuff that always has and will remain elusive because it’s behind the four walls of corporate undertakings.
05:44.72
Jon
e
05:46.02
Andy Kirk
sir
05:46.83
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I agree with all that. And i and I wonder where the data is field. Again, there’s so many different parts of the data is field.
05:59.12
Jon
So it’s sort of hard to say like the data is field, right? Cause there’s the researchers, there’s the practice, there’s the designers, there’s the computer science.
06:01.48
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
06:04.33
Andy Kirk
Yeah. yeah
06:05.87
Jon
um I just wonder where all these different groups see things, where people see things going. Right. Do we need, you know, are there are there advancements in tools yet to make? Is it should we be focusing maybe on the on the practitioner, or freelancer, trainer side? Should we be focusing more on the data prep side? I mean, I don’t know about you, but that’s kind of the part I’ve generally sort of avoided, like kind of like you’ve got some data. Let’s talk about visualizing it.
06:34.09
Jon
There’s a whole boatload of stuff that goes on behind it.
06:34.23
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
06:37.69
Andy Kirk
Absolutely right. I mean, I think part of the reason why, you know, we would we were chatting before, but part the reason why that is either hard to do or easy to not do is that first of all, every context is unique in the treatment that you need to give the data, the way that you need to transform it, prepare it, configure it, ready for its huge ah usage.
06:50.75
Jon
e
07:02.72
Andy Kirk
Sorry. And therefore to train for people to do that is, is hard to, you know, it hard to narrow down two or three reliable case studies that will cope, you know, give people most situations ah a way to cope.
07:17.00
Andy Kirk
um
07:17.31
Jon
yeah
07:17.99
Andy Kirk
So i generally talk and in quite general terms about data collecting and and transformation. And I know that in my mind, when I’m saying all this stuff across, let’s say 30 slides of ah of a course, that that is something that needs 300 slides.
07:29.16
Jon
Yeah.
07:32.71
Jon
Yeah.
07:33.11
Andy Kirk
But, you know, it’s always like, oh well, don’t worry about it.
07:33.92
Jon
Yeah.
07:34.71
Andy Kirk
and you know well Let’s just get to the cool stuff. I also think, though, that it’s something that we you can be complacent about in your own abilities to get from A to B with just the the the built-in muscle memory that you’ve developed developed over years of how to quickly get a table in Excel into shape, how to reconfigure it for Tableau, Long and Thin, or into Flourish with all the unique sort of
07:54.88
Jon
yeah
08:01.69
Andy Kirk
data sheet layouts you need each chart type to be plugged into that you kind of forget that not everyone does know necessarily how to quickly copy and paste a column and stick it at the bottom then do the repeat and do VLOOKUPs and even just write a little bit of VBA code to automate a loop and and so there is a ah curse of knowledge there which I do feel guilty of that that i need I need to address that in my materials but I also
08:06.01
Jon
Right. Mm-hmm.
08:28.78
Jon
who
08:31.66
Andy Kirk
To your point, I do think that that is perhaps where the next focus has been. you know we We have for many years talked about the little viz, certainly myself included, about the minute details.
08:41.90
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
08:44.65
Andy Kirk
ah maybe at this point in time, not just in data viz, but in the world as it is right now, that stuff needs to be just put aside for now.
08:54.58
Jon
Yeah.
08:54.62
Andy Kirk
Let’s care about some more important stuff, which is why we’re doing this. what’s the thing you’re trying to tell people or let them understand and and maybe the bigger chunk of all this hidden iceberg which is the heavy lifting of the data side
09:07.56
Jon
yeah it It is interesting. i use, I’m not a Python coder, but I’ve been using ChatGPT to like write code to like scrape out of like, you know, like pulling out to do hockey is just kind for fun.
09:18.18
Andy Kirk
likewise
09:23.40
Jon
And I do wonder whether AI changes way. calculus for people, right? You don’t necessarily know, need to know, well, from my own experience, you know, I’ll say, hey, I want to scrape this table off of hockeyreference.com on this page, you know, and, you know, I’ll give it a prompt.
09:41.65
Jon
Oh, okay, here’s the code, copy, paste it, run it. I’ll say, even the beginning, i was like, how do I even run Python code, right? Okay, it tells me how to write, right?
09:47.70
Andy Kirk
I did the exact same thing. Yeah.
09:49.35
Jon
Right, run it. Okay, here’s an error. Oh, I got this error. Okay, this is how you fix it. Oh, okay, now it runs. um You know, people can do that, obviously, with VBA. They can do that with all these tools. And um the funny thing about ChatGPT is you’ll say, fix this. It’ll fix it. And then it’ll explain to you all the changes that it made. And it’ll be like, I don’t i don’t actually i don’t actually care.
10:09.64
Jon
I’m not trying to learn Python. I’m just trying to accomplish a task.
10:13.16
Andy Kirk
Yeah. Yeah.
10:14.18
Jon
And to your point, a lot of the little viz is more aesthetic, design, subjective, human, right, where the AI can’t really answer some of those questions.
10:23.66
Andy Kirk
Yeah. Yeah.
10:26.14
Jon
um
10:27.60
Andy Kirk
But it’s also the it’s also the place where the subjectivity exists, right?
10:27.65
Jon
And so that, yeah.
10:31.08
Andy Kirk
It’s where the rules don’t have a ah touch point because it is so open in those bits of our world for there to be several right answers.
10:31.65
Jon
Right.
10:42.19
Jon
Yeah.
10:43.51
Andy Kirk
the The thing is that when you’ve got that chat GPT intervention is… are you able to validate it with your own eyeballs?
10:54.70
Andy Kirk
So you can look back at that original hockey table that you’ve scraped and you can do like 10 quick checks.
10:54.79
Jon
Great.
11:00.86
Andy Kirk
If that’s looking right, if that’s looking right, I’m i’m pretty sure.
11:01.49
Jon
right
11:03.80
Andy Kirk
And don’t get me wrong, humans will make mistakes even if they do it by hand. So it’s not that, you know we’re flawless, but when you then introduce such assistance by some other tool to to do this on mass where there could be more jeopardy of it getting, you know,
11:21.66
Andy Kirk
let’s imagine there’s there’s merge cell in a table. You know, there’s a, these are always that bit.
11:24.50
Jon
Yeah.
11:25.39
Andy Kirk
Um, and it doesn’t handle that correctly and it’s worn out and then everything’s worn out. Do you have the the scope to be able to check those things?
11:30.05
Jon
Right.
11:32.34
Andy Kirk
So that’s where there’s still that, I guess that hesitancy, but it shouldn’t mean that we shouldn’t use these tools. And I’ve done exactly the same with Python, never learned it, but now I feel that I’ve got a route into it without having to learn it.
11:44.57
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
11:45.84
Andy Kirk
But, um, but it it is the logical place for AI to live.
11:47.52
Jon
and And I think there’s… Yeah, and I think there’s a difference between messing around. I want to make a line chart of Alexander Ovechkin’s goals and you know doing an analysis that’s going to affect you know people’s livelihoods or how they get their benefit.
12:03.15
Andy Kirk
100% yeah.
12:04.54
Jon
right like So there’s there’s a little bit of like, yeah, exactly.
12:05.26
Andy Kirk
Yeah. The triviality of the topic. Yeah.
12:08.75
Jon
like you know
12:08.98
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
12:09.94
Jon
Who cares if I get the Ovechkin thing wrong because ESPN is going to do it right. Yeah.
12:14.10
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
12:14.61
Jon
um or Or even just like I’m doing it kind of as a hobby, whereas you’ve worked for, you worked with Arsenal, as I recall. Was it Arsenal, right?
12:22.44
Andy Kirk
yep
12:23.09
Jon
So like your work with them, like it’s a little bit different when you’re like working with the team because they’re making decisions based on your analysis.
12:23.17
Andy Kirk
yeah
12:28.63
Andy Kirk
and yeah
12:31.01
Jon
And that’s a different story.
12:31.29
Andy Kirk
yeah
12:32.85
Jon
um I wonder what your take is right now on um critique in the field, because when we were sort of coming in and the data, of the the Twitter data viz was all a rage, like, you know, there was always a lot of conversation about what is the right sort of level and temperature and attitude around critique. And don’t know, has the fragmentation of of social media, has that changed your calculus? yeah you Do you think of it differently now?
13:04.25
Andy Kirk
A little bit. I think partly because the fragmentation means that the communities that are popping up are a little bit smaller, a little bit more intimate, a bit more personal and at this point ah still friendly.
13:19.89
Andy Kirk
and still convivial and still kind of constructive. I think when things become so huge, I mean, not to pick on this, but, you know, think about Reddit. When everything’s so huge, so voluminous in traffic of people and so largely anonymous, you know, the kind of the gloves are off a little bit more so than when you’ve got, you know, a person that you’re interacting with.
13:29.72
Jon
Yeah.
13:40.87
Jon
yeah
13:41.25
Andy Kirk
But in terms of the actual nature of the critique, I think it’s, I do think we’ve come a long way in letting things go.
13:52.43
Andy Kirk
Even if we don’t necessarily subscribe to the choices that we witness, we’ve probably, we’ve done enough laps of this world to know that there’s probably a reason why they’ve done that.
13:52.58
Jon
yeah
14:02.87
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
14:03.26
Andy Kirk
And rather than me say, oh, I hate that red that you’ve picked, we can probably think, you know what, they’ve probably been given that as a limited palette to pick from.
14:12.04
Jon
he
14:12.70
Andy Kirk
There’s probably a design criteria. They’ve probably tested it with a certain print, whatever it may be. So I think when when you have been around the block a few times, you are able to sort of just step off the gas a little bit and think, you know what, I’m sure if i understood the real context of that thing, that that would that would be fine.
14:31.08
Andy Kirk
That would be the least worst solution rather than the best.
14:31.65
Jon
yeah
14:33.67
Andy Kirk
So I think there’s just almost a, certainly from my perspective, there’s there’s a little bit less of, let’s pounce on this thing and and start to point out the ways it could be improved.
14:40.92
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
14:42.78
Andy Kirk
But I think that last point there is is important, is that And it’s always stood the same way, which is if you’re going to have a go at something in terms of it’s not good or the ways that it’s it’s not showing the best practices, you’ve got to back up with why and what you do differently.
14:58.50
Jon
yeah
14:59.82
Andy Kirk
And the what you do differently therefore needs to be cognizant of what the context was. I mean, you know, 17 years into this field and we’re still saying it depends and and for good reason because it does. You don’t know what people have been encountering.
15:14.21
Jon
Yeah. but But back to the tools then, it becomes a lot easier to take someone’s design. I haven’t done this, but I assume it’s easier now to drop it into one of these, you know, like mid journey or AI image tools and say, hey, change all the red color to blue.
15:29.68
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
15:29.90
Jon
And so in some ways to critique, i don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing for critique because it doesn’t require you to think differently. It’s hard necessarily.
15:40.91
Jon
Like what are the constraints when you build that thing, that dashboard or that infographic?
15:43.83
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
15:45.17
Jon
You can just sort of use a tool to do it quickly. But but presumably it changes the calculus a little bit.
15:53.01
Andy Kirk
Well, it does. and And if you’ve got also access, you know, to to the to the data sources, I mean, ah you know, increasingly people do publish the data that they’ve used for, it’s not universal by any means, but, you know, there’s there’s a good fraction of works that do come with the data set to say, you know, almost like check my workings, you know, here’s the here’s the source material and almost like have a go, so you know, see what you can do.
16:13.33
Jon
Yeah.
16:17.09
Andy Kirk
But um it’s interesting thing because like going back to AI, I do think one of the, I don’t know if it exists yet, but one of the great things if it did exist would be that if you could take a chart, even just as a PNG of a chart, is there a way to scrape the data from that, the values of that data through the encodings reversed into a, I mean, that would be ah that would be a super cool thing to have.
16:29.27
Jon
Mm hmm.
16:32.83
Jon
Oh, yes, please. Somebody. Yes. Yeah.
16:39.66
Andy Kirk
And you know I’m sure it’s achievable. It’d be even more fraught for accuracy, but as a starter, as a starter, it would be.
16:45.27
Jon
Yeah, but at least close. I mean, there’s this theres there is that tool plot digitizer, which I’ve never gotten to sort of work right.
16:51.65
Andy Kirk
No, I’ve not had go.
16:53.42
Jon
But yeah, you you know even just to mock up mock something up, to say, hey, I would like to try this as a different chart or you know just just out of out of curiosity.
16:57.59
Andy Kirk
yeah
17:04.07
Jon
um so So your last comment makes me ah think about one other thing I want to ask you about. So let’s go back to the information is beautiful words. You’ve got all of your trophies lined up behind you.
17:16.22
Jon
And we’ve got um ah the Data Viz Society ah has their conference outlier coming up in June. ah they have their they have They now run the awards. And I’m curious, and I know we’ve talked about this in the past.
17:28.72
Jon
I’m curious now how you feel or think about Data Viz awards. and And I’ll caveat that because of the point you just made about the data that
17:41.97
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
17:43.47
Jon
you know, you don’t know what people have done with the data before making the visualization.
17:46.21
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
17:47.51
Jon
So so that’s sort of the motivation that question.
17:49.28
Andy Kirk
yeah Yeah. No, it’s a great point. I’m i’m just trying to think, I think from memories from like Francis Gagnon as well has been pushing this button as well, which is if you’re judging these things just on the aesthetics, then kind of make that, but make that the, the goal of the awards.
18:06.46
Jon
Yeah.
18:07.32
Andy Kirk
If it’s about the, the the work itself, that it needs to be a, a more sort of fundamental judgment of, you know, is it faithful to the data, is it disguising things, but again I think the awards to me, I’ve always leant more on the side of um not getting too wound up by the nature the notion or the nature of awards for very subjective um products or or works and and i think really
18:16.74
Jon
yeah
18:35.74
Jon
yeah
18:40.18
Andy Kirk
Although yeah you know you you never want to be like not winning or like left out the ah long list into the short list, I think it’s probably best for most people’s mindset to probably just chill a little bit and just say, well, for those who win, it’s a really nice thing and let them have it.
18:44.77
Jon
yeah
18:56.27
Jon
Yeah.
18:58.24
Andy Kirk
For those who are judging, it’s a pain because yeahre you’re rattling through all these different works, you’re limiting in time.
19:01.32
Jon
Yeah.
19:05.75
Andy Kirk
You start off very thorough with the first five and then you get into the 15 to 20. It’s like, oh God, I’ve i’ve seen enough now.
19:10.25
Jon
yeah
19:12.51
Andy Kirk
and
19:13.05
Jon
ah
19:13.30
Andy Kirk
and and And I think when, you know, to be fair, the the awards that you mentioned there, they do go to a really great efforts to get a load of eyeballs looking at these.
19:23.38
Jon
yeah
19:24.58
Andy Kirk
Not everyone looking at everything, but certainly a a nice way to just cushion the idea. It’s not just one person looking at piece. So again, with that language of it’s the,
19:36.02
Andy Kirk
It’s the least worst way to to do this stuff.
19:37.91
Jon
Yeah.
19:38.48
Andy Kirk
And if you don’t win, don’t worry about it.
19:38.85
Jon
Yeah.
19:40.98
Andy Kirk
If you do win, stick it on a ah ah top shelf on ah for about 10 years and then have ask questions about whether it needs to be dusted off and put away.
19:46.73
Jon
Yeah. yeah
19:50.13
Jon
All right. So each advice from, from captain Kirk. Um, so we’ve talked about, um, We’ve talked a little bit about tools. We’ve talked about you know lots of different aspects of sort of today’s data viz creation process.
20:05.66
Jon
um The one thing we haven’t talked about is doing it with, it this is a very, I’m gonna say right a front, by the way, this is a very good segue that I’m doing right now. um We haven’t talked about we ever talked about creating data visualizations within a team or within an organization.
20:21.45
Jon
And that’s what your book sort of tries to help people do.
20:24.08
Andy Kirk
I see, that’s a, yeah, what a bridge that is
20:26.80
Jon
That was pretty good, right? ah That just came to me too. I had had not planned that.
20:30.23
Andy Kirk
What a, yeah.
20:31.79
Jon
So third edition, third edition, right?
20:34.63
Andy Kirk
Yeah, yeah.
20:35.65
Jon
Third edition. um Imagine that you’ve got it to hold up.
20:36.74
Andy Kirk
Oh, there’s one here actually. Imagine, imagine, and imagine that.
20:40.86
Jon
Look at that. Now folks listening, of course, can’t see that, but they can imagine it because they all have it with that lovely colorful swirl on top of it.
20:48.60
Andy Kirk
Circular thing, yeah.
20:49.83
Jon
um So what is, what is the third What is, okay, so two two part question. What does a third edition do? And is it, is it, have you, have you, have you left things out from the first edition that people should be like, i need to get all three?
21:09.68
Andy Kirk
oh
21:09.81
Jon
Like, is this, now, now, now, are you just trying to like, just gain revenue or like, yeah, what’s the, what’s the third edition doing? Yeah.
21:15.70
Andy Kirk
what What level of cynicalness is it? that’s the That’s the thrust of the question. ah You know what? So I was asked… quite a few marches, I think it might be three years ago, i was asked to to agree to do a third edition.
21:33.58
Andy Kirk
And listen, this is all in the context of a a niche marketplace, but that the publishers, Sage, have always been really nice. i’ really enjoy working with them. they They asked me that because within their parameters, it’s seen as a good seller. I’d never say best seller, but it’s worthy of a refresh from their perspective.
21:53.41
Andy Kirk
When I was asked, though, I was thinking, well, I don’t, really know what is new to warrant a third edition. But I add that as well with the second edition. um Now the second edition in that case is often a little bit of a well, let’s say that the first book was a first draft.
22:11.64
Andy Kirk
Can we do it properly this time?
22:13.18
Jon
yeah.
22:13.73
Andy Kirk
Can we eradicate some of the they know and know the inefficient language, and which I definitely look back and think, Jesus, I was chewing up some of those words there.
22:14.17
Jon
yeah
22:23.10
Andy Kirk
and but um But the third edition was interesting because actually when when you look at it from a distance, it is five, six years since the second edition. And I felt that in that five or six years, I’ve continued to evolve in my lens of what data vis means to me.
22:38.11
Jon
Yeah.
22:38.28
Andy Kirk
um And you always want to update things with new examples and new reference points so to to reflect the the new work and the new people doing the new work.
22:49.60
Andy Kirk
So there is that part of it, definitely. but What i found actually interesting when I got into it um last January when I had two months left to do it was that every page I was looking at was i was seeing opportunities to either rephrase stuff, remove stuff or add stuff that just felt new ways to express things.
23:08.85
Jon
Mm-hmm.
23:12.89
Andy Kirk
and And the way that I’ve kind of concluded all this is that to me it’s the same house. If the book is a house, it’s the same house. the same rooms, those rooms still save the same purpose, same purpose. So the kitchen still exists as the kitchen, but I’ve ripped out a lot of the units and the appliances. I’ve changed the wallpaper, changed the flooring.
23:35.81
Andy Kirk
Um, I’ve got rid of the shed so that there is one bit I got rid of. So we got rid of the shed that wasn’t serving any purpose anymore.
23:39.59
Jon
Okay. All right.
23:42.10
Andy Kirk
Um, but yeah, the the whole thing has just been almost, you know, re-engineered reconstructed, but it feels to me like, um, you know, a bit of a leap forward in terms of how I think about the field and how I want to express the field.
23:55.93
Andy Kirk
I would say that the biggest, you know, I never want anyone to spend more money on books from me if you’ve already got the books or one of the books.
24:02.91
Jon
Yeah.
24:03.88
Andy Kirk
There are some completists out there who I love dearly, but I would suggest that if you’ve got the first version, sorry, the first edition, there should be enough clear water to warrant possibly third edition. If you’ve got a desire to kind of grow your bookshelf um I would always say buy someone else’s book first if you feel that something missing ah maybe the second edition to the third edition to an outside lens isn’t as big a gap as I see it um but you know I never want to prejudge how how people want to spend their hard-earned money on on my products but it’s to me it’ it’s more just those arriving into the field now
24:40.29
Jon
Yeah.
24:46.12
Andy Kirk
those for whom this is the first book that they buy with me, i feel confident that yes, this edition is the latest version of me and my brain.
24:54.65
Jon
Right.
24:55.18
Andy Kirk
and For others, it’s up to them if they want to decide to jump onto a a new edition. But it’s an interesting challenge. but have you You’ve done a second edition, right?
25:03.14
Jon
I have not.
25:05.18
Andy Kirk
Oh, you’ve just done different books.
25:05.42
Jon
We’ve talked about it. Yeah, and I’ve talked about ah doing a second edition of the of the Excel book, um but that’s a different game. That’s because the the technology and the tools have changed and Excel itself has has changed in lots of different ways.
25:18.86
Andy Kirk
Right, yeah.
25:20.09
Jon
um ah But ah yeah, I haven’t done it, but I’m i’m curious, aside from ah ripping out the shed, what are what’s like in your mind, what’s the, and aside from, i don’t know, some of like the the changes in language and and exposition,
25:37.34
Jon
what’s like the biggest, yeah, what’s the biggest renovation you did to the house?
25:41.57
Andy Kirk
Yeah, the biggest renovation is on the biggest chapter which is the centrepiece chapter um about charts. So that that so that chat chapter has always acted as the, almost in some respects, the kind of standalone section where, although you can go cover to cover, in most cases, people are just referring to that as the gallery of chart options that in any given day, they might just flick through and think, oh, it could be that, could be that, ah, could be that.
25:48.97
Jon
Mm-hmm.
26:04.48
Jon
Mm-hmm.
26:08.14
Jon
Yeah. Right. Mm-hmm.
26:10.06
Andy Kirk
In the past, I had, I don’t know, something like 40 plus, maybe 48 charts, um organized by these five families that I tend to organize things into. and But they were always different examples of each chart in terms of, I might have asked someone to give me permission to use their Sankey diagram.
26:29.33
Andy Kirk
And then somebody else gave me permission to use their choropleth map.
26:29.57
Jon
right
26:31.81
Andy Kirk
And they were all very isolated examples that looked different in terms of style, they had different topics. But in this edition, what I’ve done, and it kind of came to my mind about three days before the chapter was due,
26:46.10
Jon
yeah Okay.
26:46.44
Andy Kirk
I felt the need for greater flow from one page to the next, from one chart to next. I felt the need not just to make them all look the same in terms of style and and color palette and be made by me in the same tool, but also be about the same thing.
26:54.99
Jon
Mm-hmm.
26:59.39
Jon
Mm-hmm.
27:02.67
Andy Kirk
And so what I found was, first of all, Flourish to me, and think by default, the three versions of Flourish enabled me to make about 37 of the eventual 40 charts that I included.
27:14.67
Andy Kirk
I had to strip back to 40.
27:14.87
Jon
Yeah.
27:16.03
Andy Kirk
There was a page length, sorry, ah a book page length ah issue where I thought, right, 40.
27:19.97
Jon
Yeah, right.
27:22.84
Jon
hmm.
27:23.39
Andy Kirk
I managed to make the other three um ah with a little bit of a hack and a workaround. But um but yeah also did it on the same topic. It was all about Nobel laureates.
27:33.51
Jon
e
27:33.53
Andy Kirk
There’s a data set out there that gave me a really nice, neat data set, 1,000 records. Beautiful. Beautiful. We had dates and categories and relationships and locations and quantification stuff.
27:47.62
Andy Kirk
And it just felt the perfect all-rounder that I could then just quickly pull together some ideas for 40 pieces of analyses for each of the 40 different chart types so that when you’re reading the book chapter, you’re not i mean to remind you, okay okay, so this thing’s now about COVID and this chart’s now about sport and this is about politics.
27:59.00
Jon
Right.
28:08.46
Andy Kirk
It’s all about the same thing.
28:09.95
Jon
right
28:09.91
Andy Kirk
So it should enable you not just to sort of Follow the chapter through with a ah lot lot more efficiency and kind of gracefulness between pages, but also learn the language. This is the crucial thing to me.
28:22.91
Andy Kirk
Learn the language of the questions that these charts answer because they’re the roles.
28:27.96
Jon
e Yeah.
28:29.11
Andy Kirk
And if you start to interchange the language of, oh well, he’s iss used Nobel Laureate Prize winner there, but that could be ah department. It could be um sports team. It could be political party. It could interchange these objects.
28:41.80
Andy Kirk
in the language of the questions being answered that, you know, gives readers that more, um that almost kind of, ah that kind of flexibility to be able to say, okay, well, that was about Nobel laureates, but i can see now how that language applies to my workplace analysis case study just by changing some of these objects.
29:03.89
Andy Kirk
Because to me, and, you know, it’s not unique to me by by any means, but to me, it language is so important in data viz. this The thing you try to show, the thing you try to tell, the thing you to answer comes as before, in a sense, the chart you you’re picking.
29:18.23
Andy Kirk
And so, and and actually going back to chat GPT and the likes, that to me is potentially where there is a real role for these um tools to be able to give people a sense of, if I want to show X statement of and analysis visually,
29:18.61
Jon
yeah
29:37.18
Jon
Yeah.
29:40.01
Andy Kirk
which are the best charts or which are the charts I could consider using.
29:42.93
Jon
yeah Yeah.
29:44.34
Andy Kirk
So I think that is, and it’s ah it’s a little bit like the old basis of how Tableau is, is it the kind of VisQL thing?
29:49.65
Jon
Yeah. Let’s show me tabs.
29:51.61
Andy Kirk
Yeah, and the ShowMeTab, that’s kind of underpinning of a lot of this stuff, you know the the written constructs of what analysis you’re showing.
29:52.07
Jon
Yeah. Oh yeah. bisque Yeah. Hmm. yeah
29:58.61
Andy Kirk
so So that, to your question, that is the biggest change.
30:02.90
Jon
e
30:02.88
Andy Kirk
It was the most amount of work to to put into it, but it’s the thing that I’m kind of most satisfied that I, had the idea and sort of saw it through and didn’t take the shortcut, which was, oh no, just get lots of other examples and and and stick them in there and just go again.
30:11.98
Jon
Mm-hmm.
30:17.54
Jon
Yeah, it is ah it is an interesting ah balance, right?
30:17.80
Andy Kirk
So…
30:21.74
Jon
Like, should you go do it all yourself? Do you want to spend the year your your time making them all yourself or you want to spend your time asking people and they have their pros and cons and they’re both just…
30:33.06
Andy Kirk
Yeah, licensing.
30:34.98
Jon
but the Yeah, the creation one is is a little bit more fun, although a little bit more frustrating sometimes when you’re just like, i just want to get these three charts done.
30:38.79
Andy Kirk
Yeah, it is
30:43.58
Jon
and It’s just… I got to reshape my data once again. Like why, why?
30:49.36
Andy Kirk
I mean, they must made but there were points where I’m thinking, this sunburst chart is just not interesting.
30:55.90
Jon
Yeah, right.
30:56.41
Andy Kirk
yeah But I need to show it as an example.
30:56.82
Jon
That’s the thing.
30:58.38
Andy Kirk
So, you
30:59.18
Jon
Yeah. So, so we’re almost, we’re ah we’re almost done. and And folks are like, ah you know, folks are listening to this like, I got to get to work, but, um,
31:08.55
Jon
What did you do when you got to a point like, you know, you create a chart, you’ve got this data set, you have this nice kind of story. I’ll call it a story, although loose. um and You come to a chart type and you’re like, this is just not that interesting.
31:21.04
Jon
Are you just like, it’s okay because it’s just the point is to be illustrative to like, yeah.
31:25.36
Andy Kirk
It is, yeah. That’s the way that I kind of made peace with it, but also explained it in the book is that, you know, these 40 charts aren’t revealing 40 groundbreaking pieces of analysis.
31:35.79
Jon
Yeah, right.
31:36.60
Andy Kirk
I’d say there’s about seven that revealed something of interest to me. It’s more a showcase of the method in practice based on real data, to give you a sense of if you’re wanting to show this thing or answer this question, here’s a method that will do the job for you.
31:52.77
Jon
Gotcha. Okay. I have one last question for you. So when I first came in the field, you were already the, you know, one of the big people on campus. And one of my goals was to get into visualizing data’s, i think at that point, was a monthly newsletter, right?
32:08.21
Jon
It was like the the best stuff that you had seen.
32:09.19
Andy Kirk
It was the best of, it was the best of, yeah, the blog posts, yeah.
32:10.84
Jon
the best of Right. Right. And um so i I got, you know, once I, what I felt like once I got into one of those, I had sort of made it right. That was my sort of goal. So now you’ve got, ah you’ve got your newsletter.
32:23.51
Jon
um I don’t think you, I’m looking at it right now. Is it just, it just gave my, my thing. So I don’t, it’s got like separate sections. There’s a section on visuals. It’s not necessarily, you don’t call it best of anymore, but, but whatever.
32:36.81
Jon
How do people, there’s someone out there who’s like, I want to get into Andy’s newsletter. Like what, what, what are they, what, what’s, what’s their, what’s their, what’s their way to do it?
32:43.07
Andy Kirk
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
32:45.26
Jon
How do they get in there?
32:45.96
Andy Kirk
Well, the way to do it is please don’t email me to say, can I be in your newsletter?
32:52.93
Jon
That’s it.
32:53.11
Andy Kirk
ah this is
32:53.49
Jon
That’s the number one thing is like, if you ask you’re out.
32:54.87
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
32:55.97
Jon
Okay. I like it.
32:56.75
Andy Kirk
yeah um
32:56.85
Jon
I think it’s a good criteria. Actually. I do. and I do appreciate that.
32:59.24
Andy Kirk
but But then i’m um I’m too soft to say, no you’re out. you know I’ll find a to get it.
33:02.61
Jon
Right. Right.
33:04.87
Andy Kirk
It’s just make your work public. I mean, ah ahlthough although we spoke earlier about the fragmentation of the data viz community,
33:12.99
Jon
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
33:13.51
Andy Kirk
good work will find its way to my eyeballs.
33:16.90
Jon
he
33:17.65
Andy Kirk
Not because I’m tracking everything, but I track people who track things and they track things. and And I use this kind of ah sort of pyramid of sort of trusted eyeballs and and curators that help me to get a center what’s out there.
33:30.81
Andy Kirk
um But yeah, the the newsletter is 50 things that I’ve encountered the last month. Now ah do encounter when I kind of come down to my bookmarks, there’s usually about 200 things there. So I do have to go through a process of,
33:43.95
Andy Kirk
in some respects forming what I think is the best stuff of those 200. and But sometimes it’s just also variety of stuff. You know, you might have 20 great pieces, but they’re all about, for example, this month, you might have had 20 great pieces about the wildfires in California.
33:52.31
Jon
Yeah.
33:59.06
Andy Kirk
Well, I’m not going to show 20 pieces about that, but I might show two and then i’ll I’ll move on to another topic.
33:59.82
Jon
Yeah.
34:01.99
Jon
yeah e
34:04.61
Andy Kirk
So it is extremely subjective and instinctive on the day, which the day was today, this morning. um But it’s something that I, I did drop off because I found it tremendously hard work and it still remains hard work because I don’t want to automate it.
34:17.39
Jon
yeah
34:21.29
Andy Kirk
I don’t want to outsource it. I want to kind oft still do it myself because it gives it that extra edge of authenticity.
34:27.61
Jon
Right.
34:27.87
Andy Kirk
But, um, but I also, what I do find is that there are fewer works these days from slightly more independent producers. There is still a dominance ah of the news media because their work is very public and very shared amongst the public.
34:40.36
Jon
Yeah.
34:43.14
Andy Kirk
So, ah You know, if I said, don’t email me if you’ve got a great piece that isn’t getting traction, but you know, it’s a good quality.
34:51.47
Jon
Yeah.
34:51.78
Andy Kirk
Write me an email, but don’t ask me to put it in. Ask me to consider.
34:56.75
Jon
All right. This is key. This is important stuff for people who are listening.
34:58.40
Andy Kirk
Yeah.
34:59.31
Jon
say this is This is key. This is the stuff that you only get. ah Only get on when you start listening.
35:04.66
Andy Kirk
But, but don’t be offended or hurt if it doesn’t make it because it’s not a reflection of the work.
35:04.95
Jon
um
35:08.62
Andy Kirk
It might just be that month.
35:09.28
Jon
Right.
35:10.48
Andy Kirk
There’s, you know, your Sankey diagram is great, but there’s 10 others. I’ve had to sit through so you know it’s just yeah butpi yeah it is and don’t get me wrong sometimes I’m a bit lazy I’ll just grab the the extra excerpt from the piece but usually it’s a good articulation where it is anyway so it’s just other people’s voice but
35:13.94
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the other thing that you do, and I think you did this with the best of, right, the with the monthly ones, is that you write whatever, like a sentence or two on each of these things, which, like, that’s taking a bunch of time. I mean, that’s work. So, yeah.
35:32.37
Jon
Yeah.
35:39.91
Jon
Yeah.
35:41.46
Andy Kirk
It’ll be the thing that i’ve picked that matches why I you might have included it. so
35:45.88
Jon
All right. So they can find you on visualizingdata.com with two S’s, even though all the S’s.
35:50.37
Andy Kirk
All the yeses. There’s no even though. We don’t need to get into the even though.
35:56.85
Jon
No, we don’t. Andy, always a pleasure. ah Great to see you.
36:00.27
Andy Kirk
Thank you, John. Likewise, mate.
36:01.64
Jon
Thanks so much. Good to see you.