 There are three pure science crown research institutes in New Zealand GNS looks after geological phenomena knee-width studies water in all its various forms and Landcare research where I worked for four years is concerned with soils flora and fauna Maps play a really special role within that workplace and I'd often find some combination of of Garth and Pierre and Carolyn and Marino leaning over a roughly printed topographic map or a hand-drawn chart and Together we'd gesture and point and nod and disagree Tracing lines with our fingers and pointing out inconsistencies with ballpoint pens and by talking through the map We developed a shared understanding of our respective problem domains and Those graphical props they they really lived longer than a few hours Although on occasion a landscape profile sketched on the back of a pie packet proof so valuable that it would actually get filed away but the power of those artifacts was largely in their transience and Being ephemeral that it encouraged us to scribble and cross out and annotate all the while narrating our thought processes to one another Rebecca Solnit is Perhaps best known as a really insightful essayist, but she's also collaborated with cartographers on two published atlases This map of oil infrastructure and bird migration from her atlas of New Orleans is one of my favorites and last week I watched this YouTube clip of her Delivering a lecture where she made this statement that maps allow me to make prepositions about cities and places as nothing else does And it brought to mind my time as a scientist and how much my colleagues and I learned from the act of creating and talking about These throwaway data visualizations with one another and it made me reflect that with the possible exception of website analytics I don't see this happening to nearly the same degree within memory institutions like the ones that we work with in And that's not to say that it doesn't happen More that unlike in the sciences these activities tend to be clustered in Specific contexts or individuals rather than practiced by everyone as a matter of course And I wonder what it would look like if we folded these modes of inquiry and representation into our everyday practices of working with our colleagues and collections And these are some things that inspire me This is one entry from the wonderful data project where each week Georgia loopy and Stephanie Posovic they pick a theme and they spend a week collecting data and then creating a visual representation of some aspect of that theme and Send the other the result is of a visual data postcard and Here Stephanie is showing the individual items that have accumulated on the desk in her office workspace So something incredibly mundane and in each circle represents an object and the top ten types of items are assigned to color but what intrigues me is Stephanie's commentary when she observes that through the act of constructing this she realized that the items on my desk are more of an indication of my Personality hopes and insecurities than I'd ever realized Kate Hannah who spoke just a moment ago we together we just recently started something called the data poet society and Every couple of months we gather at the University of Auckland over drinks and food to share interesting data visualizations and learn from others Talk to one of us if you'd like to become involved Last week. I'm sorry last month Kate shared this lo-fi delight which has a gendered history of science prizes in New Zealand Presenting the data as a chart on a whiteboard allowed others to physically point at different parts of the plot making observations or asking for clarification and the interplay between the verbal narration and the pen-on-the-wall graphic provided insights into both the nature of the data and Intercate thinking processes and that's really valuable. I Think it's worth just quickly making a distinction between visual thinking and visual communication Because these modes of data of working with data they get confused, but I think that they're distinct Visual thinking which is what I'm talking about happens in private It's you alone or you and a colleague in the next desk or a small group crowded around a laptop It's tentative. It's messy and exploratory and values quick iteration over correctness Visual communication happens once you understand what you're working with and are ready to communicate this to an audience It's refined. It's reduced to a handful of dimensions and it's often performative Visual communications the realm of the professional designer, but I think that visual thinking is for everyone Sometimes I think about these sorts of working graphics as a sort of mental scaffolding In the act of rendering data or drawing our thoughts we assemble We assemble a construct to hang other concepts from So it's a construct that can be extended or modified or disassembled and turned into something new Scaffold of frameworks that help us to build more permanent structures and Graphics are a means to explore ideas and discover what we really think about something This talk came about because two nights ago I was reflecting on an exercise that digital New Zealand and the National Library online teams participated in earlier this year and he asked that each person Create a paper or a digital visualization of some aspect of our job or the collections or services that we work with We had one month to make something and at the end of that month we gathered and we shared the things that we'd made I explored some aspect of our system that had been bothering me and I don't know I put together some it was some like bloody scatterplot Hexbin thing And that was fine But the amazing moment happened right at the end where the last person up appeared really quite uncertain about what she'd made and She walked to the front of the room and she hung up this large piece of white butcher paper and Sorry, this is surprisingly emotional Because I was blown away she It was covered in a felt-tip pen rendering of our metadata harvesting system and It was seen from her perspective and it had these small little yellow post-it notes Where she traced the paths that the metadata documents where they move through the various systems and layers of technology and Puntuating this flow. She had indicated the various circumstances and contexts where a human might might touch that metadata and I played a really big role in designing the system that she was describing But I had never seen it like that I'd never seen it through the eyes of the person who was driving it and this graphic became this incredibly useful prop For her to narrate her experience and it was the space for her to convey the debt of my time's up But I'm gonna finish I got another minute in my head It was a space for her to convey the depth of her experience and to help the rest of the team Reach this shared understanding But there's something a little bit more than that Because you know when someone presents something and you can see that they're uncertain about how it's going to be received and then they get into it and What they are saying is absolutely fascinating to everyone in the room and and you feel your fellow kind of audience members Getting hooked in and the sort of glow comes off them and it pushes up to the speaker Which emboldens them further and then the talk gets better and better and this is what happened to this colleague of mine and something about giving the space Where she could demonstrate her mastery of the system and the integrity with which she treats her job It just blew me away and I hope that you can have similar experiences like that in your workplaces And I encourage you all just to make really rough graphics and explain them to one another. Thank you