 Kia ora koutou. Thank you for the very kind introduction fee and for inviting Tim and I to speak as keynotes. It's a great privilege. Unfortunately, Tim cannot be here today. There's a serious family matter, which means he needs to be elsewhere this week. My thoughts go out to Tim and his whanau during this really difficult time. I was really looking forward to hearing what Tim had to say. He's a deeply thoughtful and talented designer, but it'll just have to be another day, so you'll need to just put up with me. I'm afraid. For those of you who don't know me, I've had a really odd career. I studied human geography, geographic information systems, philosophy and anthropology at university. My PhD was on data structures for representing vague dynamic phenomena in geographic information systems. I worked at Minaki Finoa at Landcare Research as a scientist. The projects were broad, but they included things like cultural heritage mapping, land use capability, environmental accounting, soil mapping, landscape modeling, diverse things. I worked for several years as the technical manager for the National Libraries Digital New Zealand Project, and it's a joy to see so many old colleagues and collaborators here. After leaving the National Library, I variously spent time working for an education startup between Auckland and Palo Alto, and then a data democracy charity, Configure NZ, and I currently freelance for a variety of both cultural and scientific institutions. These days, I really know what to call myself when people ask me what I do. The last time, though, that I filled out a government form, I just wrote Geographer as my profession, so let's go with that. Kia ora, my name is Chris McDowell, and I'm a geographer. I slipped this slide in at the last moment when it became clear on Sunday that Tim would be unable to join us. I just wanted to acknowledge the kind of nonsense that Tim had to put up with from me over the last four and a half years as we were writing this book. This is feedback to adjustments he was making about a map of river tributaries, and he's lined up like, think of a peaches fuzz or the halo around the moon, and he was able to work with that, and he's just behind those formidable design skills. He's got this incredible patience and he was a joy to work with. Anyway, let's just get into this properly. I recognize the problems with maps. I recognize the origins as instruments of the state. I recognize that maps are inextricably wrapped around military conquest, colonialism, empire building, and the entrenchment of notions of private property and their accompanying inequalities. Throughout their history, maps enabled first the state and more recently corporations to exert power at a distance, often terrible power. Cartography is a troublesome endeavor. And yet, and yet, and yet, there's so much potential good in these technologies. There are things that only maps can express, that we have no other means to communicate. They can only be said through maps, and this is increasingly what my work involves. In a 1997 edition of Transactions in Geographic Information Science, Roger Downs wrote this article called The Geographic Eye, Seeing Through GIS. It's a remarkable piece of writing that I encountered as a graduate student, and it continues to shape my thinking 20 years later. Downs uses the 17th century painting by Vermeer to interrogate what it is that we do when we use digital mapping technologies. I'm gonna read you a few passages from the article. Here's the first. The mere's geographer, who was probably modelled on Anthony Von Leowick, is depicted working amid maps and charts, including a framed one by Blow on the wall behind. Books, a globe by Houndeus, a pair of dividers, a cross staff and a set square, were presented with an image of a person actively pursuing knowledge and understanding the tools of his trade. A man literally poised over his work. Downs further writes, Vermeer's geographer is captured as he is looking up from a map, pausing, pondering, reflecting. His dividers open in one hand and a closed book under his left. There are two charts on the floor behind him, one partially unrolled. He's leaning forward over his desk, thinking about the world, but interestingly, he's not looking at the world out of the window. Instead, given the patterns of highlight and shadow spilling from the window and the shape of the curtain hanging in his immediate foreground, the geographer is gazing at the wall of his study. He's imagining and projecting thoughts into images. His contemplative gaze at once pensive and yet intense focus not in the immediate world of reality, but on the world of the imagination. A world that has been mediated by the map spread in front of him. So those passages set context, but it's a section later in the article that really knocks me out. It's about the same length. So please bear with me. I promise it's a second to last long quote in this talk. Downs is discussing the painting's composition and in particular, the geographer's pose and expression. Vermeer was right, both artistically and geographically, to make that subtle but profound change in the direction of the geographer's gaze up from the map, away from the window and into the imagination. Geography is not in the map. It happens in the mind, although it happens through and because of the map. Geography is not a passive registration of what is in the world. It is a constructive act of will of thought. Geographical understanding comes into being because the mind is brought to be on the map. Geography is not even to be seen out of the window. It is the creation of the contemplative mind. Those ideas, obvious and commonplace, that they may seem to professional geographers are nevertheless profound in their implications for understanding the role of geographic technologies. Geography is found no more in the map than it is found in geographic information systems. Geography is in the gaze of the beholder. And those words, they continue to inspire me 20 years after first encountering them. And I'm afraid I won't offer you anything quite so wise or concise, but I humbly try to share something of use over the next 40 minutes or so. Specifically, I'm gonna share with you some of the things that I think about when I make maps. What goes through my head in that mental space between technology and observation. What do I think about when I look up from the map? So the context for most of these things I'm gonna show you are a print atlas that Tim and I recently published with Massey University Press. We are here. Should have had a slide in here, but let's go back. This is the cover. It was created by Tim and I really like it. The origin and the passage of this book are complicated. The short story is that the project took years, had changed shape several times and was mainly worked on in nights and weekends. And there were points where I thought it was never gonna get done at all. Hit me up over drinks if you want the longer version. The book is a collection of thematic maps and data visualizations organized into eight chapters. Tofenua, air and water, living things, populations, places, government, movement and energy, heart and memory. Like everything else, the book is built on things that came before. The most straightforward definition of an atlas is it's a book of maps and charts, but they come in a few different flavors. Reference atlases and travel atlases focus on a specific country or a large region. And they contain lots of fine scale, physical or topographic maps. They emphasize where places are located and how they're connected and what surrounds them. Thematic atlases explore a selected geographic theme. The theme might be geology or climate or demography or language. And the work will examine that topic for many angles. Then there are general atlases. A general atlas explores a wide range of topics through different thematic maps. And we set out to create a general atlas of Aotearoa in the second half of the 2010s. There haven't been very many general atlases of New Zealand. But around 20 years ago, two were published by Bateman in Quick Succession. The New Zealand Historical Atlas visualizing New Zealand in 1997. And the Bateman Contemporary Atlas of New Zealand in 1999. The Historical Atlas, oh my goodness. A towering achievement. Over, across 100 spreads, it explores the history of Aotearoa through maps and graphics. It was a seven-year project by the historical branch of the Department of Internal Affairs. It involved many, many, many researchers, advisors and cartographers, guided by editor, Malcolm McKinnon. Between you and me, this book gave me nightmares. First start, the size and mana of the editorial team and their advisors is awe-inspiring. People involved include Dame Evelyn Stokes, Sir Tipene, Regan, Jock Phillips, and actually I'm not gonna read, there's just too many, many, many other shining lights. The work is also incredibly comprehensive. Across 100 double-page spreads, the creators explore aspects of our country's history that are as expansive as colonialism, conflict and shifting notions of neighborhood. And then you turn the page and you drop right down to the intimate scale. The microgeography of a floor plan of an early 20th century Franklin Road workers' cottage. It's an astonishing feat. In 1999, two years after the historical atlas, Bateman published Russell Kirkpatrick's Contemporary Atlas of New Zealand. Kirkpatrick worked as the deputy editor on the historical atlas. And it described the country's landforms, environments, populations, society and culture at the close of the 20th century. Where the historical atlas kept me up at night, the contemporary atlas gave me hope. And instead of a large team, it was mostly produced by Russell, albeit in coordination with editors and advisors. And it's really unconventional in places, wonderfully so. There are these distorted projections and unusual visual perspectives. This spread here is one of my favorites. It shows how much time three women living in Christchurch spent in different periods over the same four-week period. Bottom left is Jan. She's mid-30s married with two children. The two largest circles represent time that she spent at her home and workplace. And the 30 other small circles signify a wide range of activities, socializing, movies, shopping, exercise, after-school activities with the children. In contrast, on the right-hand side in blue is Mrs. L. She's a widow in her early 70s. She lives a largely housebound life due to health conditions and a lack of income. Over the course of the month, Mrs. L visits just four places outside of the home, the Palms Mall, a doctor's surgery, a friend's house for her weekly haircut, and an age-concern outing. And I remember seeing these maps for the first time during a talk that Russell gave in 2000, and they blew me away. These intimate geographies, portrayals of opportunity and loneliness. This map and others in Russell's book gave me the confidence to be unconventional. And so both the Bateman Atlas is incredible, but each double-page spread is relentlessly busy. These works produced on the cusp of widespread adoption are like miniature archives. The creators pack in so much to each page, and occasionally I'd show them to people and ask them to talk aloud what they were thinking, and the common refrain was, this is amazing, but I feel overwhelmed. And that's where the third major local inspiration came in. Landforms, The Shaping of New Zealand. It's a 2002 work by Liz Malloy and Roger Smith. It's a thematic atlas, exploring the shape and form of Aotearoa's many landscapes, and it's remarkable. The format is the same throughout the book. The left page has a title, a locator map, and a beautiful commentary from Liz Malloy, describing the landscapes that the reader can see. Lower left is a map of the study area labeled with place names mentioned in the text. And then there's the right-hand page. The right-hand page is devoted just to Roger's rendering of the landscape. And it's big and it's beautiful and uninterrupted by annotation or symbology. And your eye can just wander freely across it. I love it. I've learned so much about Definoa from these maps. What a book. For the rest of the talk, though, I'm gonna talk about our book and I'm gonna share some things that we learned along the way. And I hope that these stories and observations will be useful in some way. This atlas took nearly five years in calendar time, yet almost nothing at all from the first two and a half years actually made it to the final book. I spent that early period trying to fuse the tone of the historical atlas with the style of contemporary cartography and data visualization. And just ended up with next to nothing to show. I might talk about that a little more depending on really how I'm feeling. But the short story is I was profoundly stuck, lacking both confidence and inspiration. And then this is where the stagnant water started to flow. This map of Te Waiponamu is, it was inspired by a fiery color scheme I saw used on a map of Icelandic volcanoes. I remember seeing it and thinking how bold it was and how I could never do anything similar. But I just tried and this is where I got to. And when I'm gonna read you, this is the last bit of long text, I'm gonna read you the original paragraph that I wrote and sent to Nicola Leggett, my editor. And it was prefaced with in the email with a caveat along the lines of, I know this is inappropriate, but I'm so stuck. And this is the truth about how I feel about these maps. So here's what I wrote. Sometimes I worry that when New Zealanders look at maps of their country, they hardly see anything at all. Those distinctive landforms colored and soothing greens and browns and white are so commonplace that people glaze over. These maps make the familiar unfamiliar, rendering elevation contour lines in high contrast blood red and flame yellow against darkness. The landscape is a body. Fjords read as brain-like folds and wrinkles. Rivers are arteries, plateaus are gauzy, translucent sheets of skin. Nicola wrote back and told me it was perfect and just keep going. And she's a good editor because it wasn't perfect, but she knew how to keep me moving. I eventually rewrote those paragraphs to better sit with the tone of the rest of the book, but the spirit of those original words is still there. And when I started showing this map and the accompanying map of the North Island to people, they were a little shocked, but they leaned in and they took a look and they would look closely, trying to understand. And they started gesturing at Fjordland Coast or the black expanse of the Canterbury Plains, saying things like, I never realized that, and that's when I realized I could go for it, you know? Shake things up a bit, not for the mere sake of it, but because in presenting something differently, it may prompt people to see the land in a new light. This is the accompanying map. Musical timeline, if it was easy, someone else would have done it. Let's jump from one of the oldest spreads in the book to one of the last ones that we made. From the beginning, I knew I wanted some map or chart exploring New Zealand music. Specifically, I wanted to create something that would help a reader see some of the ways that these artists fit together and the things that they create or do too. It turned out to be a real mission. The final chart that appears in the book is based on the audio culture's list of artists with biographies, and it's a timeline. It starts in 1924 with Anahatu and Dean Warritine Senior recording the first commercial record of Maori songs in New Zealand. Every little line, you probably can't see them, but every little line represents the approximate musical lifespan of a different artist in audio culture's data set. The colors represent different musical genres. This page goes from 1924 through the late 1960s, and this page goes from 1960 through to 2018. In the text, we note that by relying on audio culture, we privilege artists from the 1960s through to the early 2000s. Musicians from the first half of the 20th century are less well represented in the audio culture biographies so far. Aside from a few high profile examples like Lorde, emerging and more recent artists do not appear in audio culture, but I think they eventually will. It's a truly extraordinary endeavor. The true representation of this would actually just keep on expanding and expanding and not taper in at the end like it does here. The graphic employs a couple of visual metaphors. I wanted to suggest a river flowing, widening, getting broader and deeper as it travels, but I also wanted to suggest geological deposition, the accumulation and layering of materials and experiences. So that's where we ended up. And here's the long and winding road we traveled to get there. This is where we started. We started with the Discogs database, so not with audio culture at all. And what we initially thought we were gonna do was pull in, I was gonna pull in all of the data from Discogs, identify New Zealand artists, and then build a kind of network of connections between them. So I wrote a spider program that crawls to Discogs API looking for New Zealand artists. I wrote a second program that records, that reads in that harvested data and transforms them into a network graph which connects artists that are in common across different bands. And then I made like, I don't know, this, whatever that is, this network graph that sort of made sense to me as the person who'd made it and just I couldn't explain it to anybody and it's always a terrible, terrible sign. At the same time, it was difficult to automatically identify what is a New Zealand artist within Discogs. There was some amazing labeling, there was some other stuff where people release under international labels. It's really tricky. So by this stage, this is the advantage of taking a really long time to write a book, audio culture had really gained a tremendous amount of strength that the catalog of artists that they'd written about had expanded. And so I turned to audio culture as my artist source, specifically looking at the hundreds and hundreds of artist profiles. I rewrote the harvester and the data parser so that it would work with audio culture pages. I then, as silly as I am, just went and tried to make the same visualization. It's like, oh, new data, that'll fix it. And trying to connect labels to artists and I don't know what this was. No idea what that was. This, we actually tried to get it on the page and it's just, that's nonsense. Then I got really waylaid and started exploring the structure of songs by Lord and Damn Native based on like linguistic relations. So you can, like words that are co-located within the verses of Lord's Roy, it was terrible. And so I ended up just giving up for ages, like just thinking I couldn't do it. And then, and then I just, this is gonna take, this book's taken so long. I'm just gonna take however many like tens and tens of hours to make what I really want to make. And that was that musical timeline, which I'd had in my head from the beginning. So myself and a close friend, Gareth Shute, who's a music historian and writer, we read every single, we read every single musician biography on the Audio Culture website, along with their Wikipedia pages and some of their own biographies, and just started recording the dates and genres within a spreadsheet and it just took ages. And once we did that, I wrote a new D3.js script that read that spreadsheet and turned it into a timeline, which I could then make a, put into an Adobe Illustrator document that Tim could turn into something beautiful. And this took 150 hours, conservatively, that whole process. It was probably the longest in the book, almost certainly the longest in the book. But if I went to one of your fine institutions and told you that I'm gonna do this thing, it's gonna take 150 hours, I'm not sure that it would be a good investment, but maybe it would, I don't know. But this stuff takes ages sometimes, but I think it was worth it and I'm really glad that I did it. Child poverty, scale and emotion. Another aspiration from the beginning was to devote a spread to child poverty. And over the final year, I made several attempts, but again, none were quite right. Part of the problem is the lack of the detail in the data. I'm gonna get into the weeds for just a moment, not too deep. Statistics New Zealand are responsible for reporting on child poverty rates. This reporting allows the government to set and also track both three and 10 year targets for reducing child poverty. This is all specified in the Child Poverty Reduction Act of 2018 and it's a new responsibility for the agency. In early April of this year, Statistics New Zealand released child poverty data for the year ending to June, 2018. This data was based on the existing Household Economic Survey, which is a survey, and maybe this is the key thing, of three and a half to 5,000 households. Statistics New Zealand acknowledged that this is too small a survey to actually provide robust results for this particular phenomena. And it's further compounded by the fact that families in low socioeconomic areas have lower responses to the survey, which means that they're underrepresented in the sample. This is the first year of them reporting on the new act. Next year we should get better results as the survey that's currently in progress is supposed to ramp up to 20,000 households, which is a much more robust sample. Still, you've got to work with what you have. The survey that the government agencies use to assess whether a family is living in poverty is called DEP17. It has 17 questions and it's about deprivation. These questions include, in the last 12 months, have you had to go without fresh fruit or vegetables to keep costs down? Have you postponed visits to the doctor? Have you not paid electricity, gas, rates, or water bills on time due to a shortage of money? When a family answers yes to six or more of those questions, they're considered to be living in material hardship. When they answer yes to nine or more of those questions, that indicates severe material hardship. The number that's highlighted on the screen in gold is the only statistic about the number of children that we have living in severe material hardship. That 65 means that the best estimate is that there are 65,000 children currently growing up in severe poverty within New Zealand. There's no breakdown by region. There's no breakdown by household composition or by any other demographic factor. I suspect that is due to the low sample size and I suspect that we will learn more about the state of poverty in the country in the coming survey. But it meant we didn't really have a lot to work with. In the end, we decided to draw a dot for every child. Each checkerboard square is 100 dots arranged 10 by 10. There are 65,000 purplish dots representing the 65,000 children. The purple dots combined with the blue dots represent children in material hardship. You have to turn the page to see all 148,000. The lighter blue dots represent children living in poverty once household costs are taken into account. Just as a side note, I find this a very strange category given the centrality of household costs to family budgets. But I guess there's some subtle distinction that I'm probably missing. That's a combined total of 254,000 children living in poverty. That's 47,000 more than the population of Wellington City. So if you go outside and imagine every person on the street and all the people and all the houses and all the offices and all the people on the other side of the hills as well and up the valleys and then imagine another 47,000 people, just try to imagine all those people representing children living in poverty in New Zealand. And as hard as you try, I don't think you'll get close to conceptualizing the scale. A couple of people asked me why we made the dots look beautiful. It's a sad subject. They thought that the dots should have a more grim tone. We made the dots beautiful because children are beautiful. Interstitials essays and teaming masses, you're exhausting the reader. As the book started to take form, our editor sent an email which contained the line. It was very short email. You're exhausting the reader. Give them a break. I was making map after map after map and she was wise and experienced enough to recognize that it was just gonna be too much for people. There needed to be rest stops. There needed to be places for people to breathe and take stock. So we added these interstitials, these tone-setting full-page spreads that introduced each chapter. And I also approached eight writers to write a short piece that would sit ahead of each chapter. And most of the time, the authors never saw the contents of the chapter. I would give them to them if they requested it, but instead, we just had a conversation and we talked about the sorts of things that were in there and I encouraged them just to set tone in whatever way they'd like to. And about half of them were game enough to take me up on that. The other half took a look at early drafts. The essays themselves vary wildly in both approach and in tone, but somehow I think they cohere into a beautiful whole. And the other thing that we did, and we only did it a few times, oh, that's a different slide than I was expecting, okay. What we did was we ended up with the structure that forms into an easy rhythm, I hope, for people. There are these eight chapters. This is a visualization I made in PowerPoint. Each led by one of Tim's illustrations in blue and then in essay, those are those gray squares. And each column represents a chapter, a row represents a chapter, and the boxes are these double page spreads. So these are all the spreads that are based on maps. And then we started putting visualizations in as well, so different types of maps. So the hope is that there's enough visual variety to kind of break the flow and not be so relentless in the pace. The other thing that we did was add a few spreads like this that I wasn't expecting to put in, but I think they were actually really effective. I've traditionally, I've really swung around to the idea of just presenting big numbers with a subtle graphic. And there's something about these, which are, they serve as footholds into the rest of the book, a sort of way in so that people who might not be so confident in reading a map or a chart can find something that makes sense to them. And especially for kids, they seem to gravitate towards these. And the final thing, yeah, I'll just mention this quickly because it was quite interesting, was actually a decision around paper stock, and it really made me appreciate the subtleties of working with physical medium. We were choosing paper, and there's quite a few books, slides within the book, which are on quite a dark background. And dark background is, it looks really amazing when it's on a glossy print. And we were right on the cusp of using glossy paper in order to do it. And I showed a friend of mine, a photographer, David Strait, came over not long the night before we were actually making the decision, and he looked through this work and he was like, oh my goodness, you're just gonna exhaust people if this is on glossy stock. Just the eye constantly experiencing this reflected light will actually be quite difficult, I think, especially under a light source like this if people are reading it at night. And he was right. It's so much more relaxing to read with a matte finish on the page. And it's just like this little subtle thing, but it's so important because you can't patch a book and go back and once it's in somebody's house, it turns out. And I guess I just wanna highlight that in terms of all of the small details, in terms of making an experience, not relaxing, still challenging, but without unnecessarily exhausting and stressing out your reader or viewer or visitor. Lightning strikes and lots of others, getting design feedback. So at the start of this project, I was aware of my capacity to noodle on a piece of work. And so I set up a very small reference group of people who had some interest in maps and visualizations, but who were not professionals. This wasn't their focus. And so what I did was I approached these 12 people, all of them had an interest and I would send them maps from time to time. And so I wrote these emails and I sent them out. And for the first round, first two rounds, the responses were great. They were these amazing thoughts about what worked well, what didn't, what they got. The results were really motivating and their insights genuinely improved the work. And sure, a few people didn't respond, but that was totally fine. In the third and fourth round, that this sort of thing became way more common. Apologies, really snowed under. I'll take a look next week. Hope all is well. And I was, oh, I recognize these emails. I've written these emails way too many times myself. And then by the fifth round, there was just silence. And the novelty had worn off and people are busy and everybody has good intentions, but life gets in the way and it takes time to review maps and think about what to say and write it up and send it off and I understand that. And so I didn't hassle them. And if I'm honest, it also just made me feel really bad. And here, right there is where I made probably the biggest mistake of the project, which was instead of finding another way to get feedback, I retreated and I pulled the project closer to me and I worked in near total isolation for about two years, just beavering away on these maps in private, not showing them to anyone at all, except occasionally Tim and Kate, just getting stuck and throwing myself back at the wall over and over, doubt, frustration, imposter syndrome, just the works. And then a sequence of things pulled me out of that. The first was an extended trip overseas, first for a friend's wedding in Jolanda Ha, followed by a month in the Himalayas and somehow leaving the book behind just provided much needed space. The second thing also involved getting distance and it was just I got really sick. I became ill with influenza, which then pneumonia developed on top of and it knocked me out for nearly two months. I was actually supposed to attend NDF about two years ago and that was the main reason that I wasn't able to come because it was in the months following where I was just exhausted and not getting out of bed till 10 a.m. But somewhere in that sickness, I got the confidence just to throw away all that garbage that wasn't working and to start again. And the third thing though, and this is the most important, was that I started showing the work to people again and I started testing the ideas, but I changed my strategy. So these days when I test something, I invite people over and I feed them and I offer them a drink and I do a little scene setting. I encourage them to go at their own pace. I reassure them that this is a work in progress and anything that doesn't make sense is my fault rather than theirs. I ask them to speak aloud what's going on in their head, especially when they're uncertain about something or if they're coming to some realization. I used to encourage them to gesture when they're talking, but this just proves unnecessary in almost every case. People can't help themselves. And then I sit them down at my desk and I get them to page through sequences of maps. And during the session, I say as little as possible. I sit behind out of their field of view and I take notes. This is, it turns out that this is kind of classic user testing. I observe how long they spend on each map. Which ones do they linger on and which ones do they skip past? What insights do they gain? What do they misinterpret? What stories or memories do they share? What do they miss altogether? When they fall silent, I wait. And then I gently ask, what's going through your head right now? And the thing that they say in response is almost always crucial. A surprise has been that peers of people work often better than individuals. Watching their interactions is fascinating. In addition to the questions I mentioned a moment ago, there's also, which maps do they tell when another story's about? What stories do they tell? What do they debate? When does one person wanna go forward but the other person wants to hang back? With peers, I speak even less. Although when one is more dominant, there's a need to occasionally prompt the quieter person. So I bring people into my home for an afternoon. I make them feel welcome. I show them a whole lot of hopefully interesting stuff and then they're gone and that's it. And there is no more commitment for them. They leave, hopefully having seen something interesting and I've got pages and pages of deeply useful observational notes. I still do send maps out to people but I send them to domain experts. People with a pre-existing specialist interest in a particular topic. And those people, they keep me honest and they fill in holes in my own knowledge. Here's just a really small example. This map of lightning strikes originally had place names. I don't actually have a copy so I put on some place names in PowerPoint. But people kept expressing disappointment. Here are some of the things that they said that say things like, take the labels off. The place names take away from the map. Do you need places on every map? And so I remove them. And it's one of the only times we do it in the Atlas although we do have a tendency towards sparseness and I think they're right. I think that the place names disrupt the eyes movement as it flows across this data surface and what you're left with is just this ghostly electrical image. The text encourages the reader to look for traces of coasts and for mountains. And there's this moment of small delight when the casual reader makes out the Southern Elps or Mount Taranaki. Rock ages and origins and faults. I guess this one isn't for me. Now here's a bit where I admit something embarrassing. Until a couple of years ago I had no idea how to read a geology map. I just didn't get it. I couldn't make sense of the colors. I did not understand what the symbols represent. My knowledge of geological eras and periods is dim at best. It was a disgrace for someone who'd worked where I'd worked. But I learned how to interpret them and I'm still not great but at least I can differentiate young igneous from old metamorphics and it feels good. But then I started showing geology maps to normal people and oh wow, they just do not get them. It's amazing. Even simple maps, simpler ones than this excellent, excellent GNS incredible map. But with a little effort, I can get most people to a point where they understand broad patterns but it's an in-person explanation and I can't be their in-person to explain. As a cartographer, I'm often blind sometimes to how tricky an unfamiliar map can be. And more than that, I forget that there's an emotional dimension to being confronted with something that's really hard or opaque. And people were responding, it was one person in particular, I guess this one just isn't for me. And it's like, no, I want them all to be for you. And that they're right without a foothold or an obvious starting place. People will just quietly turn the page or close that tab. My solution in the book was to produce a bridge map which instead of geology maps, they normally combine together the age of a rock with how the rock was formed which makes them these incredibly precise, comprehensive artifacts but it also makes it quite difficult to get into if you don't have the foreknowledge. And what I did was I decided to separate those two things out. And so this first map is just a map at the national scale of the age of different rocks. The lighter it is, the younger it is, the darker it is, the older it is. It's been really interesting to watch people work through this progression since we made this change. That people seem to get this map. We then zoom in and show a little bit more detail on a second map. And the key thing that I'd want people to take away is really that there are some landscapes like the deep purple hills around Takaka that are made up of ancient rocks. These are rocks that existed before the first land plants took root on land. Other rocks like the Waimea Plains south of Nelson, they're young, they're just like one or two million years old. Deep time is so crazy. And they get through these two maps and there's this newfound confidence that wasn't there before. And that's when we can hit them with this harder map. I still think we have a little bit of work to do, but what I found from showing people is that they understand that this origin's map, after being exposed to these first two, birds of a feather show less if it helps people see more. I have no idea how much time I have, by the way. The time is just on zero. Oh great, that's good. I'll watch you fee. There's this wonderful series of 22 tweets from Emma Coates that she wrote a few years back. At the time, Emma was working as a storyboarder for Pixar, the animation studio between such films as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Inside Out. Back in 2011, she shared on Twitter a series of informal storytelling rules that Pixar used to guide their narratives. These have come to be informally known as Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling. When we were finishing up the atlas, I gave a talk about applying these storytelling rules to visualization design in general. I didn't want to repeat that talk today, because a few people have heard it in the audience, but I couldn't resist dropping in one of my favorites from her 22 storytelling rules. Simplify, focus, combine characters, hop over detours. You'll feel like you're losing valuable stuff, but it sets you free. Here's another spread from the book. This is a map of bird distributions in New Zealand, or several maps of several birds. Originally, when we got this data set, it had all the birds, like there were all the birds in there, and I naturally just wanted to show all of the birds. And I tried a whole manner of approaches that would pack all the different bird observation data for all the different species into a single double-page spread. And the best that I could get to was this dot map that sort of showed a kind of observational richness, where each dot counted the number of birds that had been observed at that spot, and they were sort of like land birds and sea birds, and this complicated kind of legend. And then when I showed those maps to people, they just left them really cold. There was nothing to hang on to. They were just too abstract. So instead of showing everything, we just opted to show, to focus in on a few key characters, tui, weka, kia, kakapo, and even though we showed less, people saw a lot more. Eight birds is a lot easier to get your head around than hundreds, but they serve as a way in for people wanting to know more. Tim's bird silhouettes are doing subtle but crucial work here. Another designer might have made the birds more prominent, perhaps adopting a bold cartoon style or doing some sort of intricate pen work, and the motivation might have been to make it more appealing to kids or to catch the eye and pull people in or to make it pop. And I see this a lot in both government and in corporate infographics. And I think it's usually a mistake. When everything on a page or on a screen is the same, when everything on the page or on the screen is important, nothing is important. And I don't want you to misunderstand me. I don't think that restraint is the same thing as boring. Tim somehow imbues these birds with personality. The weka is taking care with her next step. The kia's got this confidence strut. The pukeko's ridiculous gallop. He's put life into these gentle shapes, but they're not right at the front. And yet they do bring character to the maps. One of the amazing things during the user testing, and this came up on three different occasions, was the map of the Takapu of the Australian Gannets. As you can see, it's that second map, top left, where it's just around the coast. And quite a few people, and there were people usually who were less confident in reading maps, made the observation, almost always prefacing it with, this is gonna sound really dumb. But I just realized that all of those Gannets are around the coast. And it's like, yes, yes, that's right. And that little victory, that little unlocking of the puzzle opened up the other maps for them and gave them the confidence in order to read. And to start seeing things like the way that the maupork is roughly in with the, is actually kind of a distribution of remaining forest and forest stands. And it's something in there that, as a cartographer, I often don't see that. And I need to remember that sometimes putting something in that's obvious is actually really important, because it's not obvious. It's not obvious. We turn the page and the reader moves from this cast of heroes to this gallery of villains. I won't linger here except to note, for too long, except to note that I've really grown to appreciate the drama of a page turn. And I don't think there's anything quite like it in the digital realm. Watching a person react as patches of Tui and Kiriru get replaced by the sea of rats and stoats and possums is really quite remarkable. And again, I think that Tim Silhouette's, Tim's shadows are doing important work here in helping a person just jump straight into each map and to move around quickly without having to decode. I think that's one of the, I've come to think that that active decoding and having to look up in a legend or looking up in a reference is actually, well, it's totally appropriate for a reference map or a reference visualization. It really is difficult when you are creating these graphics for visual communication. They're great for visual thinking, but not so good when somebody needs to decode the language of the map. Turn the page again and you're into the cats of Wellington. Each colorful squiggle represents seven days of movements for a single cat, as recorded by a GPS tracker affixed to their color. On this particular map, there are 101 cats, exactly. Wandering the city's backyards, rooftops and alleyways. Top left. Yeah, this is a really interesting map. I mean, this map is almost, I've come to think of this map as a Rorschach test for people. It's deliberate that it, the sequence of birds, pests, cats. Some people see this map and are just absolutely delighted and their hearts are warmed and the cats are there and where's my cat and all this sort of thing. Whereas others are quite disturbed by this map and recognize that the more difficult role that the cats play in urban, but especially in rural environments around our native wildlife. And it's been a decision throughout the book to be silent on those things. Certainly there were curatorial decisions and oh my goodness, these are actually slides that I removed because I thought they would take too long. Curation's so hard. How do your curators do it? It's really, really difficult. I mean, I always knew it was hard, but oh my goodness, it's, whoa, but anyway, that aside, that's, but so much respect. But instead, with a few exceptions, I've tried to create as broad a church as possible for this work. I have a tremendous concern about the filter bubbles that we find ourselves living in in 2019. And while there are things that I would like to put into this book, and there are a few places where I couldn't resist, but which are advocating particular ideas that I have, I want this book to be read widely. And I want it to be a point of conversation and maybe even a point of common ground for people. So that was in part, so this sequence scene is about as provocative as we get in this chapter around cats and people thinking about cats and their role in an urban landscape. Until Friday, I actually thought this was a pretty good map. And then I had a couple of conversations around, with friends around a fire in the Henderson Valley. My friend Matt bought up this map and he observed how compact the cat ranges are and how they only occasionally sort of burst out into the wider neighborhood. And I started responding to him and then in a flash, I realized what I wish that I'd written in the text description. So this is a map that shows just a tiny number of the cats in Wellington, but it makes you sort of think that it's like implicitly that it's almost all of them. I want you to imagine this map, but instead of 101 squiggles, there are tens of thousands and they're all jammed together so that almost nothing can be seen on the base map. And it's just this solid multicolored mass of furry beings packed in really tightly with these slightly overlapping territories. So this map is okay, but it doesn't give that impression as it stands and it's something for me to work through a favor or turn to it. And the Aotearoa Song Map. When the trees matter more than the forest and this is where I run out of notes. So we'll see how this goes. Coming from working within the National Library of New Zealand with so many of your taonga I wanted to have some visualization within the book that reflects that and that communicates that. And I tried really hard and I couldn't do it justice and I wanna talk about that process. So the first thing that I did was that I I know the Digital New Zealand API reasonably well. And I wrote a harvest of script that went in and built this big map of the domain, whether it's like from the sciences. I know this is impossible to read. It's just one of those. Whether it's from the sciences or one of those terrible things that people do is the rest of that sentence. Whether it's from the arts or from the sciences or from government records and then sort of maps it to the organization that contributed it and then what collection it falls in. And it just made this chart that was really interesting to the staff at Digital New Zealand. And probably interesting to the collaborators, to the contributors, but I don't think it's interesting to the wider public. And so I just kept going. And so then I approached Adrian Kingston and he provided me some access to some metadata from Te Papa's archives, particularly around, sorry, not archives, collections, around artworks and photographs and so on. And so I started exploring that. And so I started looking at the at, this is a bar chart that starts in 1750, runs around to 2018. It's all of the artworks in the collection that were in the spreadsheet that Adrian gave me. I don't think it's all of the artworks in the collection. It's just the, ask Adrian. But there was like all these interesting like kind of peaks and stuff. And I took a look at them and this particular peak here, I think for me at the end of the 19th century, it's like, well, it's 462 Sydney Parkinson engravings. And so I took a look at those and it's like, okay, there's a whole lot of those, these botanical engravings and they're really amazing. And I was like looking at it and going, I'm just describing the collections. I'm not, and the collections are incredible and they're beautiful and they're amazing. I could not find a way. And this may be my own failing, but I could not find a way to make these compelling to the audience that I was writing for. And that's because I don't know if the collections themselves and their structure is what's interesting. It's actually what's in the collections that is totally amazing. Like the material that's in there just blows me away. And it felt like I was devaluing those artworks and photographs and sculptures by just kind of like putting them at this really high level and doing these high level descriptions. This is something else that I tried. And this is the only one that I wish that you could read. Some of you may be able to read it in the front. This, I took a whole lot of like, I looked at the photographs collections that were geocoded photographs of photographs in the Te Papa collection. And I located them all on a map and I found the most common tags. So like there's things in there like round, Picton for example, there's ships and insects and trees and bridges and in Wellington there's banks and women and taverns and beaches. And there's horses and there's mountains where you might expect there to be mountains and there's lakes near Lake Topor and there's women in the Hokuyanga and there's trees on Great Barrier. And it's just like, this is dumb. This is at best a character and at worst misleading about what is actually in this collection. So I looked for example at like, there was like horses and there was Maori and there was women. And what is that? Like this, when, this is incredible. This, the photograph is what matters. And by not, I felt like I was disrespecting your collections by trying to make these graphics because I couldn't give the subjects the respect that they deserved. And so I backed away from that entirely. And instead what I did was create a map that I am happy with because it's that the corpus is small enough that I could represent every single thing. And I couldn't represent every single thing when it came to your collections. And so what we did again, it was another music map, another music graphic and it was the Aotearoa song map. And so this came from Radio New Zealand, RNZ, I should say, RNZ and their listeners over two years. They crowd sourced all these different songs where people have sung about a place in New Zealand. So there are things in there like there's the exponents singing about Casual Street in Christchurch. There's tiny ruins singing about the museum in the Winter Garden in Auckland. There's sweat with their personal history of Onihanga and this was much closer. This I felt like this actually respected the source material. Yeah, I think it's a thing within data visualization at the moment that I'm quite uncomfortable with that losing sight of the trees because you're just trying to show the forest. And I was gonna finish up with some tech stuff. It's just gonna be like tech, tech, tech for about two seconds. In case you're interested, everything was created by me in using open source software in the creation of these maps and of the data visualizations. And Tim then would work in Adobe Illustrator, which is a proprietary software in order to create them. But yeah, we were able to do every single thing with open source software. And that's an amazing situation that we're in. The data was almost all open data. We paid for exactly two data sets for the entire project. One was GNS, which was the geology maps, which is provided on a DVD. I think now I actually probably could have got that for free, but it probably wouldn't have been in the spirit of open data. So we just paid for it and got it very easily. The other was with an international telegeography who maintained the cables. They actually released the data for non-commercial products for free. And as this was a commercial, a book that would be sold, they gave it to us on the condition that we send them a copy of the book. Everything else was open data. I think that having said that, I think that the state of open data in New Zealand is a little stagnant. I think it's really good, and we've got to a very good place, but I think that there are some subtle spaces of resistance within government, and it would be good to see those opened up where appropriate. The final thing is that in that spirit, I released all of the programming code that I wrote in order to create the graphics that appear in the book on a GitHub repository. So if anyone is of a technical bent or wants to, is just curious, available there is all of the, almost all of the code. It's been a very busy month, and I haven't quite got chapter eight in there, but when I go home, you betcha that's gonna be there. So yeah, feel free to go in there and just take a look at how it was done. The actual layouts themselves are not released in there, but the code is there, and also a detailed description of how each of the 84 spreads was created is in there. There's also one in the back of the book. And that's it. Thank you very much. Thank you.