This week I’m kicking off a new series on the show called My Favorite Graphs, where I walk through the projects that shaped how I think about data visualization, data communication, and data storytelling. I’m starting with the Guardian’s “Bussed Out: How America Moves Its Homeless,” published in December 2017, an 18-month investigation into the one-way bus tickets that US cities hand out to homeless people. I walk through the scrollytelling map that opens the piece, the animated bubbles and journey timeline, and the arc chart of relocations out of New York City that has stuck in my head for nearly a decade. It’s a project that blends journalism, video, photography, and data visualization about as well as anything I’ve seen, and I talk about why the decision to animate rather than let readers click and hover was the right one. I also have a treat at the end: Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu, who did the data analysis, design, and development, sent in their own recollections about how the project came together, what nearly broke them, and what it meant for their careers.
Resources
“Bussed Out: How America Moves Its Homeless” (the Guardian)
Nadieh Bremer – Visual Cinnamon
Nadieh’s project write-up for Bussed Out
Shirley Wu
Data Sketches, by Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu
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Transcript
welcome back to the policy viz podcast i’m your host john schwabish on this intervening
middle episode of the show i’m talking about the first in a series of podcasts where we talk about
my favorite graphs now these are the graphs that help sort of shape my own perspectives
on data visualization data communication data storytelling and i’m not doing them in any order
it’s not from first to last it’s not alphabetical not by times just by what i feel like recording
on that particular day so that’s the goal here hopefully this will provide you with some you
know maybe historical framework for data visualization or maybe this is just a vanity
project i don’t really know but hopefully this is worth it to you and you find some value in
exploring some of these projects that maybe you’ve never seen before or you forgot about depending and
we are going to start with the guardians project from december of 2017 bust out how america moves
its homeless now if you are watching this on youtube i’m going to split screen this you can
actually see the project if you are listening on the podcast on the audio i will describe what i’m
looking at so you can listen to this or watch this wherever you like so and i’m not going to go through
every detail right i’m not going to go through everything i’m just going to show you the highlights
the stuff that i love most about these projects so we start with a looped video of a bust coming
from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen here is the headline bust out
how america moves its homeless each year u.s cities give thousands of homeless people one-way bus tickets
out of town an 18-month nationwide investigation by the guardian reveals for the first time what really
happens at journey’s end now this is a combination of data work from the guardian team with a number of
their journalists with the development done by noddy bremer and shirley woo and so what happened in this
project is one of the first projects at least that i can recall that really did i think a superb
version of combining journalism video with the people who are the subject of the news story with
data visualization and in this case it’s interact it’s animated uh data visualization so some
interactivity but it’s mostly animated visualizations and i’m going to start at the top here but i’m
really going to focus down as i get further down to the visualization that really is the one that
that sticks in my head that i remember so the whole story starts with the um story of a person named
quinn raber who was bused from san francisco to indianapolis so the whole thing starts with a short
two paragraphs and then a big map of the united states and we see as we scroll so it is a scrolly telling
the animation starts with a red line starting in san francisco san francisco and moving east
to indianapolis and the text scrolls on top and so today this is pretty standard right this is pretty
standard parallax scrolling at the time it was new i mean today you can do this in a tool like flourish
right you could just do this right out of the box but at the time this was a really new uh approach
that was that was being tested out so we scroll through the first part we’re getting into the new
story it’s setting the stakes for what we’re going to see the map then changes to a choropleth map
looking at the state level homeless rate uh per 100 000 people as we get to a certain part here in
the story um we start to see some more animation uh and as we scroll that animation continues so several
states are highlighted on the map in red dots with labels and then we start to see the animation
of these little let’s sell them blue dots um as people move from city to city and they are moving
the bubbles are expanding as the population moves between city and city and then below that
is a timeline on a vertical bar chart showing the number of bus relocation journeys so we have
two visualizations working simultaneously in an animated way so there’s nothing for us to click
highlight you know get more information on it is sort of the movie version of this new story and
of course now today we see these well maybe not as much animation today but at the time this was
really new and this was really exciting remember december of 2017 okay so we scroll down and now
the visualization moves off the screen and now we’re into text and we’re into text with some pullout
quotes so it’s not just a wall of text we’ve got the pullout quotes and then i think the part that
really sort of for me did such a good job of mixing these methods of storytelling data visualization
qualitative work is we have a couple of videos with people who are subjects of the story so we actually
have the video we can hear their voices we can understand their story a little bit more okay i’m
going to scroll down here because there’s a couple of videos and a wall of text a couple of of looping
videos and then we get to the part that i just remember this is the part of the story that i remember
we get to a visualization probably about almost halfway through homeless relocations from new
york city is the headline around 650 people were flown to foreign countries and when we get to this
part as we scroll down we get one blue line an arc from new york city on the left to new zealand on the
far right and so this is an arc chart which i can’t recall really seeing one that worked this well so
we see the one line and then a whole bunch of others fill in so we have new york city on the far
left new zealand on the far right and then between we have different countries right so now we’re going
to foreign countries we have mexico dominican republic france nigeria india and it’s scaled by
by location by journey length which is also just really smart and we’ve got a number of different
attributes working together so the height the thickness and the color saturation of the lines
are doing a lot of work here to show us you know the longest journey and then along the horizontal axis
where the city sit the size of the bubble corresponds to that to the number of people and as we scroll
continue to scroll we then get from new york city they show new york city to puerto rico so they zoom in
onto the most common destination so here we have canada dominican republic puerto rico and a few more
and then as we scroll down we get to the most popular destinations in the united states and now
again this animation kicks back in with the same structure set up with new york city on the left
the u.s city stretched out along the horizontal axis san francisco on the far right so it’s using the
same horizontal dimension of distance the same coloring on the arcs and then the same size along
the bubbles but we have three visualizations going from the global to i guess i would say maybe like
the western hemisphere and then zooming in to the united states uh itself i man i just love this
particular visualization i thought this was and still do when i say thought i just mean at the time but
still do think this was such a great piece such a great use of the arc chart that we can show
distance here and we can use the combination of color and saturation and size of the bubbles
to show all these different pieces of of the data so that brings us to about halfway through the story
that’s the part that i remember that’s what that’s what sings to me i’m just going to go a little bit
further here just to show they have more visualizations so there’s kind of a sankey diagram a little bit
further down that has um where recipients go based on the median income comparing their origin city
to their final city so we have the the sort of normalizing the data of where they started
relative to the median income of where they ended up and so the headline here is that 12 percent of
people were relocated to cities where the average income is higher than where they started and the
remainder 88 percent were moved to uh cities that were lower and next to that what is a sankey diagram
is like a little histogram a histogram of showing the distribution of that median income just really
smart really good ways um to uh combine these different data types and as i as i hover and click
there’s nothing to hover and click on right it’s not it’s not interactive which you know i think there
was a period of time where everything was interactive this was just smart because it’s still telling
you the story and you don’t have to click and hover and get all the details because you know i think
there was a time where everything was clickable everything could hover and get more details
and at least for this story this piece um there was maybe a realization or recognition that
yeah not everybody’s going to click now everyone wants to click let’s just get through the story
because i’m only halfway through so this is a big investigation that they did okay so we keep
going down we’ve got some more video we’ve got more texts more uh photographs more videos
um telling people’s stories we get a little bit further down and then we look at the relationships
between people we’ve got sort of a bubble scatter plot um and again more videos and then the end of
the story uh at the very end is another bit of a scrolly telling um this one shows um animations
of uh people represented as bubbles moving um from city to city sort of overall um what that looks
like as people journey between those different cities and we see a couple more animations before we
get to the end of the story um where we have to finish up the video of quinn raber who was the subject
of the new story in the very first paragraph in the very first piece so in my opinion my perspective
this is just an expert way to tell a story this is actually telling a story right we throw around
the words data and story a lot this one i think just does such a great job and for me the arc chart
the animated arc chart is the thing that just sticks in my head it’s just a piece that i have
really loved uh since it came out back in december 2017 so that’s my perspective on this first of my
favorite graphs and i have a special treat for you i asked naddy and shirley to send in their
recollections on this project and they sent me a fun little uh audio snippet so i’m going to play
that for you take a listen to naddy and shirley’s uh recollections on this great project from the
guardian uh bust out and i hope you enjoyed this episode i’m just gonna let this play and i will see
you next week uh once again for an episode of the policy viz podcast first question about bust out
how did it come together naddy
yeah so i was approached by two journalists from the guardian us about how they have been working on
um like an entire news section on their website about homelessness in america and that they’ve been
gathering data about how homeless people were being bust around the country uh and and data about like
the bus tickets given out by shelters in cities and they wanted to tell a story with this they knew it
was like a very like they were sitting on a treasure trove of information but they needed somebody to
bring that information to life through data visualization so um they they asked me if i was
interested and i naturally said yes but i also could see that this was bigger than i could take on a loan so
that’s when i thought well immediately i want to i want to work together with shirley on this so that’s uh
that’s how we teamed up and then um with my background as uh as a data analyst i took more of
the data cleaning and the data um analyzing on me and shirley we can talk about it later but you took
more of the coding on you um and then there was by luck we were all in the same city san francisco
together for two days like the journalists and you and me and then it’s the it’s at that point that i
did all of the data analysis and uh we talked on about how the whole story should kind of work which
different subsections should be and then we started brainstorming about um the different like visual
designs that could go with that um yeah so that’s kind of how how the start of it came about
yeah and actually i think you had a lot oh yeah yeah i was gonna say like you you could talk about
the challenges you fit because i think you had the bulk of those well i want to actually also say
first how fun it was to get to work on this with you nadia because i think this is our outside of data
sketches i think this is our biggest collaboration um and also how fun those two days were i think that
when we work remotely with clients we kind of forget how fun it is to be able to ideate in person
and then like energy of like the four of us um like where the journalists knew the story and then
you knew the data and then two of us were like pitching the designs um that that was such a fun two
i’m gonna start there um um because uh like nadia said uh i was asked to pull the uh the coding part
of the side of it together so it was because this one this project was not only data visualizations but
they also wanted uh media they wanted photos and they wanted videos looping videos um and they wanted
all of that to work um seamlessly while we while while the scroll was happening um so i was in charge
of pulling that side together and i think that’s where i ran into a lot of the challenges um not not
as much to do with the actual web implementation but this was the first time and maybe only time
that i’ve had to implement things not only for the what the browser but for a client’s mobile app
and the mobile app not only on the mobile app on both ios and android and then having to debug
a web view within ios and android and i think that that by the level of pain
um i think that that might have been the biggest challenge is not being an ios or android developer
and still trying to figure out what the bugs were inside those apps um with no clear understanding
of the debugging tools for those apps yeah i would say that was the biggest challenge i think that i
uh for about two weeks was not in a good place
i remember that oh man yes yeah because it’s kind of because i think we didn’t face a lot of
challenges like in a in a non-coding sense because all the collaboration between the journalists and
us together it was all very smooth and we were all very much aligned so then yes those coding challenges
did did did grind you down for too long yeah and i guess this was like pre you know being able to just ask
an ai like why is my app not working um so it was just a lot of banging my head uh on uh on the laptop and
then asking for help from uh guardian developers in australia um because they understood the apps the best it
was it was honestly really cool to see all of the like help we were able to get from people within like
the guardian organization um but yeah so i guess then um the question is like how do we look on it now
you know what i realized i think it is now eight or nine i think nine years since this piece published
yes yeah it was 2017 yeah man it’s been that long um i think it’s still one of my like definitely like
top 10 projects yeah uh and i still get sometimes people telling me that they read it back at the time
or it made an impact for them and i also believe it it generally made an impact on on this issue
where i think the journalist got on like national television a few channels and was able to tell the
story so that’s good um but honestly i just my my personal memory is just that it was like how it was
working together together with you for the first time and how fun it was like like you also mentioned
to be able to kind of brainstorm ideas about the same thing like with data sketches it was both of us
working separately but giving it to other feedback which is very different than working on the same
story um and working together making it making it happen um so that was that’s also why to me it’s
like a one of my precious precious projects uh in that sense you’re right that’s such a good point
i totally forgot about that um but yeah to echo what you were saying that
actually yeah i don’t have any more to add on that it was a really fun one and i think it might
be the only one where we got to work on the same code base on the same project and be able to
brainstorm together um and also um the same for me is like i think it is one of the projects that
people remember me by it’s always either hamilton or this and then like a few other then there’s like a
few other projects that people will be like oh i saw this um i guess terms of yeah personal impact
um i think that that was an extremely empowering project for me because i think this was our this
was maybe my second or third big client project and i think that before this client project i had
steered away from very serious topics i just was like oh you know i’m i don’t have any domain expertise
in um in any of these uh topics so let me just kind of stay in my lane let me uh let me let me
make a dedication to hamilton let me like cover things like let me cover things in pop culture that
nobody can get mad at me for covering um right and and then i think this was the first time where i
got to work on something that like felt so serious and so important and like nadi said that um the
journalists who went on and talked to policymakers and um that it was that it sparked the conversation
um was an extremely empowering experience of like oh if i’m able to work with domain experts like that
that is the role i want to have is impact like is enabling domain experts to tell the important
stories um so yeah still one of the most important projects i’ve gotten to work on
do we have other memories right i think i think that’s i um i don’t know but i feel like we’re
definitely over the five minute mark you’re right all right thank you bye john
bye bye
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