Kind: captions
Language: en
[Applause]
oh hi
i didn't see you there
[Laughter]
[Music]
how long is a waiting line consisting of
24 king cobra stretch end to end
how heavy would a large school must be
if it's only filled with clones
of nicolas cage sometimes it's pretty
hard to get a sense of numbers or
imagine what they mean but thankfully
they're experts in the world whose job
is to make those numbers
tangible one of these people was
florence nightingale
a dedicated nurse a pioneer of modern
nursing and a statistician who made
lasting changes to britain's health care
system
another is mona chalabi a data
journalist who's dedicated
to visualizing everything from how hairy
you are
to vaccination rate two healthcare
inequalities
based on race and ethnicity let's start
with florence's story
time machine 1854 please during the
crimean war in scutari
what is now ushkodar a district of
modern day istanbul
you might know her as a lady with a lamp
that nurse who saved lives during the
crimean war of the 1850s
the hospital guru florence nightingale
named after the italian city of her
birth
florence she was a strong-willed kind of
awkward
and also an educated lady who at one
point cared for a tiny pet owl
named athena but it's also important to
recognize that florence was a strong
supporter of the british colonial rule
that caused the death and subjugation of
indigenous people all around the world
through her writing we know that she
believed that imposing the british
culture
and norms and other people to be very
necessary for the expansion of the
british
empire the alternative and i'm quoting
here
would be simply preserving their
barbarism for the sake of preserving
their lives
so yeah florence and many other iconic
science figures throughout history have
problematic stories
many times their contributions to their
societies came at horrible costs to
other people impacting their lives even
today
so as we talk about these figures we
have to be aware of the complicated
legacies that these people have
okay back to the crimean war when
florence was dispatched to a hospital in
scutari
wounded british soldiers ended up at
this hospital where florence was in
charge of supervising 38 nurses
she was going around trying to take care
of the wounded as best
as she could getting them food clean
utensils
and towels making the hospitals more
resistant to the cold weather
and providing cleaner water but many of
the soldiers there were dying from
illnesses
unrelated to their actual battle wounds
things like typhus
typhoid and cholera
why you ask look at this place it's
filthy
i mean look at this it's a rat it's you
you you it's looking a bandage now why
hey hey bring it back and there it goes
the rat stole the bandage wow yeah
okay this place is legit filthy
eventually
the british government sent out supplies
and people to help clean up the
hospitals
and after that the death rate super
plummeted
okay fast forward some years and the war
is over
florence is back in england and everyone
is like
oh my god it's fun it's a fangirl fan
though
you're so great you're so famous we love
you bubble
but florence is not about the celebrity
glam life
you see florence was not only a capable
nurse
but as i said before she was also a
great statistician
and she didn't forget the lessons she
learned during the crimean war
so when florence got back to england she
was very adamant to prove her point
using stats stats dance
so with some help she started collecting
numbers from military hospitals near the
battleground
and from military hospitals across
britain
so how many people died here and was
that from the battle wounds or was it
like um
the filth literally killed them
and based on those numbers she confirmed
her hunch
hey y'all we need to make our hospitals
cleaner
soldiers in the hospitals are dying from
all the dirt and
poop and sewers infecting them rather
than the wounds themselves
she prepared a whole report to prove her
point but she knew it couldn't be a
regular report you know a
big boring one filled with numbers that
none of the ministers or decision makers
are going to understand
who's going to read that so she took
refuge in data visualization
she gathered up all her data and put
them in a fancy looking chart that
turned all the numbers into an easy to
understand
image each wedge corresponds to a
different month from april
1854 to march 1856
see the blue parts those are all the
deaths from diseases
not war wounds the pink sections are
war-related deaths from injuries
suffered on the battlefield
and the black bits are other causes of
death
florence's use of data visualization to
show the importance of sanitation in
hospital was a big deal
like when i decided to never again get
bangs with her visualization
it was pretty obvious what was really
causing all the deaths
soldiers were 10 times more likely to
die from diseases spread through filth
than from battle wounds themselves so
florence proposed that parliament do
something to improve
overall public health you see hygiene
was not just a problem in hospitals but
also a problem in the streets and homes
of people in england
poop poop everywhere and all that dirt
was getting people really sick
eventually parliament passed the public
health act of 1875 which forced
landlords to connect their pads to main
sewage lines
life expectancy in england went up so
hooray
for data and no more poop on the street
this is one of the first moments that we
know of
where data visualizations successfully
influence public policy
data visualization can help us
understand numbers and figures better
and that's not just limited to pie
charts
bar charts or that chart with lots of
dots on it yep that one data
visualization can get fun and creative
too
like the work of mono chalabi the
superstar
data journalist i grew up in east london
um where i was raised by my parents who
were both iraqi immigrants
when i was much younger i really really
loved maths i found it really kind of
exciting and satisfying
but that feeling of satisfaction kind of
really quickly started to slip away
when i went to college i had grown up in
an area of east london that was
incredibly multicultural
all kinds of different people lived
around us all kinds of different
cultural backgrounds and then i kind of
like
landed in this college campus that was
overwhelmingly white
sounds familiar i remember how it felt
sometimes to be the only brown person in
the room
it's isolating socially and you start
questioning your own
knowledge experiences and expertise
and on top of all of that moana had to
deal with a topic that just felt very
disconnected so initially i had tried to
study economics and philosophy
and the further that you got into
economics the more that these formulas
were just presented to you
as abstract i have a really clear memory
of kind of sitting in this
university auditorium and looking at
this textbook that had this formula in
it
and i found it really difficult to grasp
those concepts
and also to care about them when they
weren't attached to the real world i
just didn't really care anymore
eventually mona dropped out of the
undergrad program to go
to the land of croissant and camembert
france not to study baghetology which
obviously i would
but to do a masters in international
relations
during her degree mona started working
on a project that involved lots of data
collection
i really enjoyed making the charts i
would kind of obsess
for hours over things like the font and
the placement and the colors that i'd
use
they stay in people's memories better
and they
have greater impact my role was to take
all of this statistical data about what
iraqis needed
specifically iraqis who had been
displaced as a result of the conflict
and then to create figures that could be
taken to international donors to say hey
this is what these iraqis need
can you supply those goods those
services
so i recall one particular conference
where there was an iraqi that was there
who was responsible for actually
conducting the questionnaires themselves
and he said to us you know you gave us
surveys to ask the iraqis do you need
food or blankets
but what we actually need is electricity
generators and that just wasn't on the
survey
and it was just so transparent how data
can create self-fulfilling prophecies
this idea of a feedback loop that you
see the world one day and
that reinforces that vision of the world
and then recreates the world as it is
it became so clear to me the importance
of disseminating information as widely
as possible
but also especially to get the
information
in front of people who you're claiming
to represent
at its base data journalism is about
representation right
a chart is claiming to represent a
constituency of people
and very often those people didn't ask
necessarily to be represented in that
way
so the very least you can do is ask
those people
did we get it right so obviously the
natural path for her after this
experience was data journalism
communicating data to more and more
people but yet again like in college
mona found herself surrounded by people
and
ideas that felt just not at all like her
i first moved to the us to work for a
data journalism site
i was really excited to be working with
other data journalists but we didn't
have the same approach to journalism
their goal was to communicate to people
who described themselves as geeks and
nerds
it was an almost entirely white male
organization
i was the only person of color with only
immigrant writing on staff
it was just awful like i was repeatedly
made to feel like an outsider and so
i just quickly became
quite depressed really i recall one
situation in particular really vividly
we were sitting in a conference room and
we were talking about how to cover the
uk general election
and i recall one of the editors saying
you know
who could we have to cover the uk
election and i'm sitting there
in this room with 25 people that i've
worked with for a year
i'm the only british person in the room
they know that i covered politics
in the uk before coming to join them
and there was a pause and then one of
the editors was like of course i know
who we could ask
and he mentioned the name of a guy who
is american who was still
in college and up until that point
the only thing he had written for us
were a couple of pieces about the joys
of scrabble
and i was just like okay like you don't
see me at all like there's no point me
saying to you i'm qualified to do this
mona's job was to make information
visible but
she herself felt invisible even the data
she was working with did not really
represent her
it was just so disconnecting eventually
though mona found a platform and a style
that really worked for her
and that made her feel seen again i
started to draw these data
visualizations that i would
put up on instagram even though it
sounds superficial
to have the validation of strangers
seeing your work
and saying a this makes sense to me
and b this is useful information for me
to have
really solidified my identity as a
journalist
and that i could do this and so i just
leaned into doing more of that
i started to create more and more of
these hand-drawn data visualizations
and yeah kind of haven't stopped since
mona has visualized many data sets from
topics related to animal extinction
to police brutality and even the cost of
living
or dying monad downloads data from
different databases
and then gets to work she has a pretty
unique style
imperfect lines whole numbers
none of those percentages estimated to
the second decimal point
what does that even mean her style is
just
very human when most people look at a
computer-generated graphic
it presents the world with these sharp
edges and this degree of precision
that feels like it's not quite true to
our lift experience
i think i'm communicating that
uncertainty is inherently a shaky line
and that's the way that we know the
world for example somewhere between five
and ten percent of women doing x
it's not down to decimal places so um
i really wanted to communicate the
uncertainty with which we understand the
world around us
as a way to build trust data
visualization is not just arranging
numbers on a page or a screen
it's about telling stories about the
data breathing
life into the numbers and it's important
for people to feel represented and seen
in those stories
like what mono is trying to do also data
visualization can serve different
purposes
whether it's to improve conditions in
hospitals through policy
or bringing attention to social or
environmental issues
we just have to be creative caring and
find a space for all of us in the
numbers
a waiting line consisting of 24 king
cobras stretched
end to end would be only a few feet
longer than the statue of liberty is
tall
a large school bus filled with nicolas
cage clones would weight as much as two
t-rexes