 Our next speaker is the art director of information graphics at Scientific American where she started as an assistant director back in 1996. And then she joined the staff at National Geographic Magazine before coming back to Scientific American. She studied geology and studio art at Smith College and received a graduate degree in natural science illustration from the University of California. Please welcome Jen Christensen. So as the program promises, I'm about to walk you through the process of developing data visualizations for Scientific American. But rather than focus on the tools used to create them, I'll be addressing things from the art director's point of view. I have the distinct pleasure of hiring designers on a project by project basis. So I can rely on the talent and the constantly evolving skills of freelance visualizers. So my job lies in helping to match the right artist with the right data set and then nudging things along, always with an eye to the ultimate audience. In our case, it's a science savvy but non-specialist reader. Before I talk about specific projects like this, I'd like to step back a little and provide some context. The collaborations that I'll be speaking about are entirely driven by the ultimate context. And by that, I don't just mean final medium such as ink on paper or pixels on screens, but also the meta context, including Scientific American's international editions, our legacy and the realities of our workflow. Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. It was founded in 1845 as a four-page weekly devoted primarily to inventions. In 1921, the scope officially broadened. It shifted from a weekly inventor's paper to a monthly periodical of popular science. Several redesigns occurred during the decades that followed, but the next watershed moment occurred in 1948. When the magazine expanded coverage beyond advances in industry and embraced the broader world of applied and theoretical science, the magazine would communicate science in a clear language to the interested layperson. The English language website was launched in 1996. This is how it appears now. It's followed by the next major magazine redesign in 2001. And our most recent redesign of both the magazine and the website occurred in 2010. Our tablet edition for the iPad was launched in 2012. And we have 14 international partners who have access to our original content, but also develop articles specifically for their own audiences. So it's not a page-for-page direct translation. We're also now working on a multilingual web content, which should be challenging for interactives. We'll get there when we get there. Meticulous illustrations of inventions and mechanical properties were a trademark of the early issues. And although many of those diagrams were based on exact measurements, I think this diagram on inertia, momentum, and projection can be considered the first proper data-based chart in the magazine. Perhaps it's a little generous. It portrays an impression of the values a little bit more than an exact representation of the values. But the fact remains that it exists specifically to communicate a concept based on measures. This example is pulled from an issue after the 1948 redesign I mentioned earlier. This is the era that resonates the most with me. It's classic science communication in which a scientist, a journalist, and an artist collaborate to reach a non-specialist audience. The style continued for several decades. As an announcement leading up to the 1948 redesign stated, the Scientific American will employ pictures to communicate the science precisely and plainly, just as this 1975 chart pair on cancer. But in a few more decades, plain would be a little out of vogue. The graphics in the 2001 redesign issue mark a distinct departure. The charts are broken into smaller, more digestible nuggets. And the introduction of non-content varying details, such as a third dimension and drop shadows, they suggest that the goal of the graphics is no longer simply to convey the information as clearly as possible. They are also being used as devices to activate the page and entice readers. But rather than dismiss the 3D pie charts as misguided, what can we learn from this conscious choice to shift from plain and precise to self-consciously dynamic? After all, illustrative details at the expense of a clear read of the data is nothing new. So what do these two eras, 1921 and 2001, what do they have in common? Well, in both cases, the magazine was actively trying to engage a broader audience. It's an honorary and necessary goal, which leads me to today's philosophy towards data visualization in the magazine. My goal is to help produce graphics that honor the data, but also entice the reader. That means embracing new forms when appropriate and never underestimating the power of a welcoming gesture, such as the B illustrations here. So another bit of key context, workflow. At Scientific American, we officially launched the visuals for each issue with a day of preliminary art meetings. They're half-hour brainstorming sessions based on the first draft of the text for the article and notes from the article editors. Our article text editors have subject matter beats, whereas our art department is a more generalist team who have media beats. I do information graphics, we have a photo editor, a layout editor, etc. By the end of the day, we're usually able to rough out a basic plan for the whole issue. I focus specifically on the graphics needs. Here's a basic production schedule. It's not quite this linear as Matt Bostock's earlier talk touched upon, especially that first two weeks. I should probably change this graphic. There are usually five articles with graphics needs each month, and two issues are always solidly overlapping. So let's move on to the graphics. I'll start with two examples pulled from the same issue. First, the flavor network. This was a print-first project that would accompany a somewhat playful introduction to our full single topic issue on food. The graphic would be based on results published in a peer-reviewed journal. You may recognize this figure from the original paper and scientific reports published back in 2011. It connects food items that share chemical compounds. They then went on to cross-check those connections against recipe databases to see if there was a relationship between off-impaired ingredients and their chemical compound overlap. As it turns out, western cuisine does tend to pair strongly related ingredients, but classic recipes from East Asia do not. Our goal was to create an image that would bring some of the researchers' conclusions to a new audience and perhaps reveal the patterns in a more intuitive and engaging way, although this was a pretty darn good figure for an original scientific publication, I must admit. The paper was open. I could download the initial dataset right away to review, and it was a signal that the authors would likely be open and excited about collaborating, which they were. YYON and Sebastian Anert were really helpful in suggesting a filtering method and reviewing sketches. With the data in hand right away, I could go ahead and carve out a space for the graphic in layout, and I reached out to freelancer Yann Willem Tulp to see if he was interested in the project. Now a reminder, I'll be speaking about these projects from the art director's point of view, not the artists. When possible, I'll also direct you towards some resources that will help flesh out the story. In this case, check out Yann Willem Tulp's presentation from the Visualize conference in New York. I don't believe the video is live yet, but here's a link for when it does become available. There's a landing page with just no content available yet, kind of teaser there. For this project, my directive to Yann Willem was fairly open-ended. Take the dataset behind the original flavor network diagram, and develop a one-page variation on it for our print magazine. If interest builds and if an interactive made sense, then we negotiate a web companion item. So this is the first sketch that Yann Willem sent to me. You'll see from his Visualize presentation that it was definitely not his first attempt. Like Mike spoke about earlier, kind of the wild exploration stage happened before it got to me. And at this point, we're starting to now kind of polish as we're headed towards some very real print deadlines. I tried to get concept sketches into layout as soon as possible. It became clear that I'd need more than one page for the graphic and to set it up with some text. So coordinating with the whole article team as soon as possible would increase my odds of being able to take on a little bit more real estate and spill over the gutter for an introduction and annotations. So back to the sketch. Yann Willem's motivation? Well, the original flavor network already did a great job of highlighting the topology. He could improve on it by sorting or grouping to make it easier to read the information. He sorted the ingredients into columns by category. Each black dot is an ingredient. The size of the dot corresponds to how often that ingredient appeared in a recipe database. The blue circle paired with each black dot represents the total number of links with other ingredients. Gray lines connect ingredients with shared chemical compounds within the same category or food type. Orange lines connected ingredients with shared chemical compounds across categories. The vertical position of the dot is based on the ingredients mean shared compound value for all of the links that an ingredient has. So this was the sticking point. In some ways, it's a logical metric to sort by. Ingredients with lots of strong relationships would rise to the top. But it's kind of a complicated measure. It takes a few mental leaps to figure out what it's showing. The overall structure and plan for the graphic felt right, but the metric behind the vertical position of each dot wasn't very intuitive. So I asked for variations. Yann Willem sent lots of options. I notated his screenshots with a description on the right to solidify the logic in my own mind and so I could more efficiently communicate with others on the article team. I won't get into the details on all of these sketches, but thought you might like to see some of the options that followed. This one was my favorite. Vertical position is based on the total number of connections to other ingredients, not the strength of those links. The blue outline circles that originally held that information were no longer necessary. Once the structure settled in, we turned to fine-tuning the aesthetics, informed by the color palette and style that was emerging for the full special issue. Here's the final article. You'll note that we added annotations to bring attention to a few points that we found interesting. But perhaps most critically, we included a really large how to read this graphic panel in which we walk the reader through the symbols used in the graphic in a very conversational way. This approach emerged really organically from the verbal explanation I had to provide to a colleague whenever I showed them the graphic for the first time. And it was more inviting than a small key or legend kind of hidden in the corner. This is also the first thing you would see for the interactive version. While I was fine-tuning labels working through the fact-check questions and presenting a print version for press, Jan Willem turned attention to developing the interactive version for the website because folks at the magazine were definitely interested after having seen what he had done with it thus far. The best option based simply on our budget and deadline schedule would be to start with the print version and then allow readers to select and view by-ingredient. This would allow them to see all of the connections by selectively removing many of the lines. Now selecting by-ingredient did seem logical, but a drop down list for over 300 ingredients was unwieldy and a complete list on screen was not legible. Fish eye distortion as you can see being experimented with here was still too dense to efficiently navigate. So what about simply clicking on the blue ingredient dots? Well it turned out that many of the selections only showed a very sparse network. Of 381 ingredients, 148 had no links outside of their category, so they would only have the gray lines, not the pink or orange ones. And 150 just had one link outside their category. So only 83 ingredients would have two or more pink connector lines. Randomly clicking on ingredients might not yield a very satisfying experience for the user. So after exploring a few other ideas as well, Jan Wellum suggested that rather than selecting by individual dot, why not select by a row? The reader would be less likely to accidentally stumble across a really boring ingredient time over time over time, and this approach would also still filter out many lines so that an individual connection, you could still follow it. Here's the final page in its entirety. Now originally I had hoped to simply embed the interactive version in our iPad app, but we're using our app using Adobe DPS, and we ran it to some bugs. Without the time or resources to properly sort through the problems, I had to simply reformat the print version to work on a tablet screen, and we linked out to the full interactive that resided on the Scientific American server. Here's a look at how things were rebuilt for the iPad. Slide out instructions on how to read the graphic, and an annotation overlay. Now circling back to the other food-related item. In this case, the assignment was much more open-ended and pretty much out of our comfort zone. It would be a digital-first reader-directed exploration tool, drawing from a large data set but without pre-analyzed conclusions. I asked the Office for Creative Research for food-related suggestions. Jared Thorpe and Ben Rubin pitched several ideas. The magazine team was most interested in data about produce shipments into the U.S. based on daily reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Here are some preliminary explorations of the data over space and time. And this is how the final data ended up being displayed. Readers could choose the produce item by a drop-down menu and customize the time period by sliding date tabs at the bottom. Three produce items could also be compared against one another on the same screen. And total import volume over time could be explored on an interactive map. A few details still needed to be sorted out with the interactive item, but the reality of the press schedule meant that we needed to turn attention to the print item. An early concept sketch contains some really neat ideas, but it was overly ambitious for a single static page. I see this a lot when folks move from the web to the print page. They want to get all of the ideas that they developed for something that doesn't have space limitations onto a single print page as well. So we tried deleting some of the sides of stories and clicked the maps into a small multiples grid. Here's the final page as it appeared in the magazine. And this turned out to be a bit of an informal experiment. Two interactives launched at the same time, both on the topic of food. One was fairly contained and based on a single study. The other was much more robust and open-ended. The flavor connection did really well for us. It had lots of unique views and was picked up quite a bit from other media outlets. The produce finder didn't land with as big of a splash. There are lots of variables that I haven't accounted for. Each item was promoted differently on social media and even our own homepage. But my instinct is that folks liked a contained item with a clear punchline and a scientific backbone. The produce finder might have been just too open-ended. We didn't give readers a clear directive or a reason to explore. Or maybe it was because the flavor network highlighted beer and cheese and the produce finder highlighted kale and broccoli. But regardless, I think there's value in both genres and we're keen to keep experimenting on both fronts. So far I've talked about a print-first project and a digital-first project. But sometimes the needs of print and web are so different that it makes sense to approach the same data set differently for each medium. For our annual State of the World Science special report, I hired artist Arno Gelfi for the print spread specifically for his bold and dynamic style. For the web, however, I can embrace a quieter aesthetic as evidenced by the interactive from Yanwell and Tulp. Here's a closer look at the print spread. The center spiral of bubbles represent the top 25 countries in science as measured by an index based on research paper output. The bottom left list shows rankings for a few other measures including a number of patents granted. Yes, we could have made this spread work harder in terms of density of information, but in this case, it all came down to the context. The full section was really text heavy. The central graphic spread not only needed to show the data, it also needed to act as a welcoming entry point into the whole section. Yes, data visualizations should honor the data, but they also need to be mindful of their context. On the web, the graphic would be presented as its own module. The context was very different. Here we could focus on presenting more information. We start with country rankings, but the reader could also see absolute numbers. And sometimes no matter how much it pains me, an interactive web version of a static graphic might not be the best use of limited resources. Although Moritz Steffener would have been supremely capable of creating an interactive companion to this print graphic, I had to be a bit realistic about things. The page is based on a neat nugget of a project in which scientists Laurel Burkle and her team compared their bee and flower interaction data with a similar study from the same site conducted over 100 years ago. It was a perfect candidate for a static one-page standalone graphic on the topic, but the scope might have been a little narrow for a full interactive. We ended up doing a static version of this kind of reformatted for the screen in the iPad instead of doing kind of a variation on it. The text editor and I were initially captivated by the study when doing research for a different, broader article on native bees. We set aside this figure from the original paper to revisit later. I couldn't help but wonder how someone like Moritz might reimagine this dataset. He wrote about this graphic on his blog, so check out the link above for a great process post which also speaks to some of the tools that he used. But I won't attempt to rehash that now. Instead, I'll pick things up after he reached this point. After many concept sketches, he settled into basing the structure on the bees themselves. Here, each pale yellow circle represents a bee species, active in Carlinville, Illinois in both the late 1800s and 2010. Pink circles represent bee species that were active in 1800 but are now locally extinct. Each tab position within those circles represents one of 26 species of plants that are pollinated by that group of bees. The color and size of that tab holds information to how that interaction has changed over time. I was sold on the basic concept, but there was still work to be done. Moritz tried grouping species by genus, but this preliminary sketch did not include all of the species, and although it's intriguing from a visual standpoint, there wasn't a strong editorial reason to group them by genus. So I took the original pattern and built out a version that included the correct number of circles. Once we sorted out that the graphic would actually fit on one page, Moritz started refining things. Rather than have the extinct bees pop out in a strong pink or red color, he let the circles fade back, helping to reinforce the idea of disappearing bees. And to help reinforce the hunting home pattern, Gillian Walters illustrated three bees in a vintage style as a subtle nod to the project's start in the 1800s. Since this is an unusual graphic form, we needed to really craft the annotations and labels. Once again, we led in with a conversational style, rather than just featuring a stripped-down key or legend. So let's revisit the legacy of Scientific American. Most of my decisions are rooted in the tradition of precise and plain visual explanations of scientific discoveries. But I also need to be cognizant of the need to be accessible and inviting to broader audiences. In my opinion, those goals are not mutually exclusive. But in certain contexts, even within the same magazine, it may make sense to shift a little bit in one direction or the other. I may skew towards a more playful and lighter solution when the graphic itself also needs to function as an invitation to dive into a larger text-driven package. I try not to underestimate the value of a welcoming gesture, such as illustrative details, and maybe a clearly stated and upfront invitation to read the graphic provides a little leeway to feature a more complicated or unfamiliar visualization form. Thanks.