 Cool. Thank you so much, and thank you so much to Catherine for that really inspiring talk that got me into the sphere of all things open. So, hi everyone. I'm Anne. I'm an anthropologist and I guess a person that has a crush on DataViz and visual storytelling. I'm also an ex-fellow of the Open Knowledge Fictionless Data Program. I hope you all tuned in yesterday to fellow fellows talking about these tools, but today I'll actually be talking about something a little bit different. My co-conspirator, Miriam Matheson, and I have been working on a project on supply chains for the past couple of months, and today we kind of wanted to talk more about the methodology of the project and what it means to kind of, especially as a researcher, to kind of try and make something more engaging in the process of doing research. I'll tell you more about what I mean in a second. So, over the past couple of months, and really over the past number of years, both of us in different ways have been focused on supply chains. And just to have a sense of shared definitions, supply chains, while I put a definition here from the ILO, it's really thought of those kind of everything something goes through from its raw material all the way to its final product. I want to push back against that definition a little bit, but essentially a supply chain is kind of everything in that process, all the industries, all the people, everything involved in that. You might be more familiar, of course, with these sorts of charts, right, but try and kind of take this process that's so global that encompasses so many different things and puts them in much more of a visual format, makes it a lot easier to digest, right? But of course, if there's anything that the past year has shown us, it's that all of these supply chains are incredibly vulnerable. We've seen so many maps, of course, about how international trade has been totally disrupted, about how all the supply chains for everything that we use have been changed because of the pandemic, but then at the same time, while we have these kind of big picture ideas of what COVID-19 has done to supply chains as we know them, and also these photos are very specific instances or specific effects of that disruption. I especially really was honestly shocked by these huge piles of potatoes that were found in, for example, in Idaho here when there was no one to buy their potatoes. And so it's kind of, in many ways, it felt like we were almost going back and forth between these very, very global understandings of what a supply chain is and also these very specific instances of what that disruption looks like in real time. And of course, alongside all of this were a lot of different things happening at the same time, everything from protests and labor movements popping up worldwide as these supply chains were being disrupted, especially across the government and delivery industries, but also unofficial forms of media popping up, like farmers joining TikTok. Clearly, I'm really into the potato fetters and just grabbed a couple of these from Twitter and from TikTok here. And really kind of, again, around these global things and very specific instances of human experiences. And similarly, our interest kind of collectively really rose throughout the same period. So this is just a screenshot from Google's like news database and showed that there was a really big spike right on this time, March through May 2020. But that kind of ever since then, there's overall a larger interest, there's also these oscillations just like everything else, especially with the news cycle. So really, as Miriam and I started talking more and more during this time period, around this time last year, when all these stories were coming up, we were really thinking, OK, well, supply chains, they really only become visible to the public when they don't work. As researchers, we've kind of been looking at these processes for a long time, but in a way, they've always been vulnerable. Just enough and just on time is the management mentality behind supply chains. And of course, something like this was this type of disruption on a global scale was perhaps bound to happen at some point. And of course, as the kind of last graph showed, popular coverage is very cyclical. And because of this, the gap that we were seeing and kind of what was reported on, kind of in the news cycle was in many ways very different from what we were seeing on officially on Twitter and social media. Ask a lot of questions about who's covered, what is it? And we were wondering if there's any way to bridge this gap. Of course, researchers always love the CSFs, love putting everything into spreadsheets, but these are perhaps not as impactful as photographs like this. Again, just so many potatoes. So really, when we started talking about possibility of doing something together related to supply chains, we were asking ourselves, as researchers, how can we create this repository of information that is more than just a collection, but is also visually engaging, that grabs people, that impacts you and in an emotional way, like somebody like Davis or digital art, but is also something that we can build upon over time that is a sustainable resource and is something that can be something that we can learn from as we grow over time and give us an excuse to learn from many others. And so the first step kind of in this process, in a lot of ways, was us very much kind of experimenting with what it meant to talk about supply chains to crowdsource a bit. We joined this website called Arena and actually, finally enough, Arena is kind of like a social network for more visual work and for link sharing. Very organically, people started to, almost like a chain, adding their own research or their own stories to collections of links and resources that we were gathering together and in many ways, kind of got us thinking, okay, so we hear so much about the crowd, we hear so much about the potential for crowdsourcing. It sounds like there's actually other people that are interested in this sort of research driven, but also visual at the same time. Second step was writing an essay together about an essay, 10 sentences, that in many ways tried to summarize years of research about supply chains in a way that we thought might engage humans and not other academics. And that eventually became the open page of supply chains to us. I know I haven't talked a bit about the website, but I swear that it's coming. Third step, after we'd kind of tried to ground ourselves in the research that we were doing, we thought, okay, how can we take this out in a more active way to people? How can we talk about something that's so global, again, so big, and ground it in specific instances, or honestly, see how people are thinking about it as well, because perhaps we are too deep too quickly. So this is a screenshot from the first workshop that we ran out in Mozilla Fest this past spring, back in March. Really fun, really interesting experience to just kind of engage how everyone is thinking about these different processes. We really didn't know who to expect, who we were going to chat with, and then ended up being a bunch of different people across a bunch of different industries that very organically, when they themselves were trying to understand and ground the headlines that they were seeing in supply chains and something more concrete, very much started connecting between all their different brainstorms with each other. And this web emerged kind of organically over time, and we kept thinking, this is something that we want to continue. And so pretty organically from that, we started this supply chain's reading group where a couple of us get together every two weeks to talk about either a case study or a kind of larger theoretical reading in a way that helped us to understand these sorts of complex phenomena. And for us, kind of every step through this process was very much us trying to ground these processes in something very specific, but also it felt like together we were creating a sort of, collectively creating a kind of story around our language that could help us to tell a story around supply chains or perhaps many other stories. Finally, we're in this process, very much in this process right now, but we started kind of transmitting all these things that we were collecting from either peoples individually or all these different groups into just many, many spreadsheets and are very much trying to create like a shared language or a way through which, again as researchers, we could turn them into interesting people. So that a learning experience would be seen if anyone has any experience with this sort of translation if you have any tips for us, get in touch. And then finally, we're right now working on kind of these two main vocal cries. So raw materials and extraction economies is kind of what we focus on while Miriam's much more than the transport and shipping arenas. We're right now in the process of very organically trying to turn them into visual material. And for us, in many ways, for us kind of redefining what data this is into visualizing information in a way that humans will like kind of change the game for us, especially as researchers that want to get past papers. So just to ground it again in something real, we, these are a couple screenshots from our database that's growing slowly over time. And we just actually released all of these sheets open to the public. So if you have anything that you'd like to input, if you have any comments, please, please feel free to do so. Very much following in the spirit of what Catherine was saying, I think the openness of the project is really so important for us because we've learned so much from all these different public events that we've been a part of and different people and different groups that we've interacted with, but at the same time, it's definitely something that we would keep on doing otherwise. So again, I'm going to say this a million times, but really, I think in these sorts of projects, we want to try and go back and forth between these very global, like big data ideas, trade analytics, for example, to specific individual stories. This obviously is a mock up because coconuts are not mined and hard to go, but I think it's, in many ways, it's trying to give you an example of what we mean by this, where we want to be able to put all these different types of material about supply chains in one place so that can be something that you can explore, that you can discover, that you can kind of look at over time, that also grows over time. And we simply just want to be stewards of that. So just to put it in a different way, mixing the visual with the numerical, hopefully put together will create a format for us to create more of an inclusive, decentralized way of sharing stories from and about the supply chain for such a complex set of industries. They're also very decentralized and global themselves. These are a couple of phases. We're now kind of somewhere between phase one and phase two. If you want to join the reading group, please get in touch. We'd love to have you. If you have any interest in getting involved in either digital art, do research on supply chains, get involved in any way. Give us some guidance on the tech side. Please, please reach out. But the goal is eventually to kind of, you know, we began with the technology industry, but really to expand into other industries. I showed you all lots of photos of potatoes earlier. For example, food is something that's something we're really interested in expanding to as well. But we kind of want to stay away from two things, two problems that we see with this sort of project. One is kind of information glut. Neil Postman, who's a media theorist from the late 10th century, put this really well when he said pre-internet, pre-printing press in many ways. We suffered collectively from a kind of information scarcity. But today we have another problem, which is the opposite, which is that we're surrounded by too much information and we're flooded with it. Therefore, we don't necessarily know what to do with it. And so, especially with something like supply chains or even thinking about, you know, the number of headlines we were surrounded by last year, we wanted to make sure that, you know, the experience on supply chains that us would be something that's a little bit more serendipitous, but also not overwhelming. It's something that people could return back to. But at the same time, it doesn't simply turn into a spectacle. I guess this is, again, like maybe something that comes from the researcher instinct. But I think Bell Hooks put this really wonderfully when she talked about the analogy of the classroom, where, you know, even the most engaged classroom, the most engaged syllabi, could be ruined by too large of a size. And so, while we want to, you know, grow and expand, ultimately the idea is that the quality of information, the quality of the stories, the types of things that we want to collect and sort of into this space we want to be really intentional about. Because otherwise, it might just become another place of entertainment. And if another person's stories or an entire industry's stories becomes nothing but a spectacle, it doesn't really help us to care about all of the people or the processes that are made invisible because of it. Yeah, so with that in mind, this is kind of what we were looking to do, moving forward. But ultimately, just with the goal of, you know, combining visual storytelling with crowd-sourced research, but making sure that it's something that we can build on over time and making sure that, you know, ultimately the goal is to not only educate, but to help people, you know, understand these processes a little bit more, while we ourselves are learning more about them. I guess that's all from me. If you want to reach out, feel free to send us an email at our collective email with Miriam and I or reach out to me individually over email. We'd love to get any questions, any comments, critiques, anything at all, really. Miriam is also in the chat, so she'll be able to answer some things as well. Maybe we can get her changed in. Thanks so much, everyone. And thank you so much for that was a really, really great and interesting talk and we have four minutes left, so I'm just going to roll straight in to ask you some questions if that's okay. Cool. And the first question is, has it been easy or hard to find data about this? Because I imagine that some of it's hidden or not openly available for commercial reasons. Easy or hard? And if hard, why hard? It's absolutely so, so different. Depending on what part of the supply chain that you're looking at. So very interestingly, I found that there was a lot of information about, for example, when it came to labor on the mining side of things and also the manufacturing side of things. A lot of investigative reporting going on, but everything in between. So smelting, refining different parts of the manufacturing process. A lot of the shipping and anything related to logistics not very reported on. And so we have this huge gaps in information. Where literally certain types of elements would also be called something else by the time they reach another part of the supply chain. So half the work I think is trying to create a shared language around supply chains or at least a language that we can operate off of and making a database that makes sense. But I think actually one of the most interesting things was the types of information that we didn't expect to come across. And I'm going to cite Miriam here because she always comes back to me. So she focuses more so on the logistics, shipping side of things. And was telling me about these YouTube videos and these podcasts that Seaman, the ones who are operating boats that move around the world make about their experience. Almost like blogging. So see if they are blogging is really big. And it was cool because as someone that's reads off a lot of labor and extraction seeing someone blogging about their work experience in the middle of the Pacific I think gives you a completely different insight into what it's actually like to be within that industry. And I think it's that sort of contradiction that we really wanted to highlight or at least put up on equal terms in a lot of ways. Long answer to your question but thanks so much. That was a great one. That was a good answer. It was really interesting. Thank you. I'm going to ask you a question but it's going to be a short answer if that's okay. And maybe you can expand on it later in Slack. It's a question that I have as well actually. So who's your intended audience for this type of data? And do you find you think about tailoring it towards different groups? I think for now it's almost like we just want to get as much information as possible but what's been interesting is for example in the reading group of people who join have different ideas of what they want to do forward. So for example there's very much an interest in this sort of collection in these is legal evidence for example or like advocacy evidence. And I think that that's something that we're definitely interested in too but I feel like we've got to dig through the massive data first.