Inside the Mind of a Data Artist

When talking about big data solutions and applications, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical details of hardware, databases, connectors etc… These items are all the means to an end, which hopefully result in experts and non-experts understanding the story behind the numbers.

Back in November, New York-based educator and data-slinging artist Jer Thorp spoke at a Ted event in his native country about the weight of information and how a childhood experience led him down the path of rethinking visualization of bits.

For more than a decade, Jer has been institution-hopping, with stints at The Vancouver Film School and the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Thorp is presently an adjunct professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a graduate program focused on alternative media.

Along with his teaching background, Thorp’s software-based work has been exhibited on five continents and around the Internet. His next stop will be at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Putting a much-needed human spin on data, Jer explained his interest for data and history calling them two exciting and possible things. Joking about his nerdy past, he displayed a childhood picture with the likeness of a preteen Bill Gates.

At the age of 12, Thorp received his first computer, an Apple that included a program called Hypercard. The software allowed users to create their own applications with an interface that stored data in cards. The cards were then arranged into stacks and could be linked to each other, not unlike the Internet links pages together today. It was the last program of that type to ship on a public computer.

“I thank the stars for Hypercard all of the time, and I thank the stars for putting me in this era where I got to use Hypercard” he continued, “If you talked to the people who invented the computer and you told them there would be a magical day where everybody had a computer, but none of them knew how to program, they would think you were crazy”

His Hypercard experience drove projects later in life, from displaying growth systems in plants and simulating economies. A gallery of recent works ranging from Haiti earthquake aid to sustained silent reading analysis can be viewed on Thorp’s site.

The New York Times tapped him to become their data artist in residence where he visually compared the terms Iraq vs. Iran and crisis vs. hope using timepiece graphs. ;

In collaboration with Mark Hansen, a professor of statistics at UCLA, they created a tool called Cascade. The premise was to understand how content is shared over the Internet, specifically, how content gets from one individual to another.

Since the Times produces over 6,500 pieces of content each month, Cascade was designed to be an exploratory tool that didn’t use “canned data”. Thorp described it as a vehicle that allows users to traverse the terrain of data.

Continuing with his quest to build a narrative from data, he collaborated with Jake Barton to design the naming layout on the 9/11 memorial. Instead of putting names in alphabetical or chronological order, they were organized by relationships the victims had with one another. Family members and co-workers were placed next to each other. ; ;

During the talk, Thorp polled the audience to find out how many members were also iPhone owners and went on to explain a project called OpenPaths, which allows users to discover their own location data. This location data was the source of much scrutiny for Apple earlier last year, but in this case, the user would have access to the data they were creating.

At first, he didn’t think discovering this information was important, but later found the experience to be quite moving. He showed the audience points in time on a map as he recalled the moment he left the plane coming to New York, his first dinner in the city, and the day he met his girlfriend.

To show the contrast of raw data vs. the story it creates, he displayed the raw location data created by his phone and mentioned that it was LaGuardia airport, a Thai restaurant, and the moment he met his girlfriend. You would never know it by looking at the data alone.

“We can put data into a human context. I think we can change a lot of things because it builds automatically, empathy for the people involved in these systems. That in turn, results in a fundamental respect, which I believe is missing in a large part of technology. ”

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