(So, I’m still talking around – rather than about – the coronavirus here. Just dropping that word in for some point where I search my own site for the word, this can come up. The last post didn't mention it directly, although it was clearly influenced...)

This is a beautiful piece of data art.

Some people look at data art as a challenge to do the most original, visually interesting, arresting piece of art that somehow corresponds to a data set.

Thats fine… But it’s the line of thinking that gave us all those 3D charts in old versions of Excel and chartjunk galore.

The other way of looking at it can get you to a different place - how do you make 'art' that actually represents the data? I think some of the best data art boils down to a straightforward bar chart, and this is no exception;

Rather than play around with things like the shapes or colours of the bars, this chart plays with the axes - often overlooked as a boring feature that you can get rid of with some clever labelling.

What this chart shows is that the scale breaks the chart. It breaks the whole front page of the newspaper - like a crack along a fault line. It doesn't just take up a horizontal strip along the bottom of the front page, but one of the six columns as well. Sure, the 2008 recession took a hit (that slightly encroaches on the space that should belong to the text above) - you can see that unemployment cla pretty much doubled at the time, and took years to get back to pre-recession figures. But they've been steadily dropping for the last decade. Until now...

Art has a unique role in culture, in that it helps us to imagine and prepare for new possibilities. Sometimes, those are hypothetical futures - for example, imagining how the human race would deal with different kinds of alien encounters helps us to figure out what kind of race we actually are. Sometimes they are real - people who have never lived through a war can arguably get a better sense of what that experience is like through film or poetry than through the historical documentation.

When we encounter a new situation that is unlike anything we have presonally experienced, we turn to art for our points of reference. Usually, that means films - when city streets are empty, its like a zombie film.

There's something weird about the current situation though, in that most of the art that we might turn to for a point of reference as we prepare ourselves for new realities is a) almost certainly visual (because the number of cultural touchpoints we have from the world of TV and film of the last decade or two far exceed those from the world of literature), which means almost certianly commercial (because it takes far more money to make a film than to write a book)- and I don't think a pitch for a film where all the characters are forced to remain at least 2m away from one another while also staying at home and away from other people - would be likely to result in a Hollywood blockbuster or a hit Netflix series. (Not before this month happened, anyway - I'm pretty sure those pitches are being worked on right now...) A 'collapse of society that happens to not be very photogenic/cinematic' is a weird form of danger to consider us being fundamentally unprepared for.

We went through a phase some years back where every film had to have a shot where the protagonist lost/broke their mobile phone, just because it was much harder to create tension in a lot of situations where the protagonist could just call someone for help (or google the crucial piece of information). I wonder how long until we settle into a routine where characters in film and on television maintain 'social distancing' rules.

Back in the day-to-day of the real world, I haven't yet got round to deleting all the things in my calendars (work and personal) that have been cancelled yet, so I got a reminder at the beginning of this week that I was supposed to be running a data visualisation training session. Obviously, I'm not going to be travelling into London for non-essential work today, and even if I were the hundred or so people who would be sitting in the room wouldn't want to be sitting in a room with a hundred or so other people. But this chart is definitely going to be included in the next version of that training that I put together.

It seems reasonable to assume that at some point in the next 3-6 months or so, travelling for "non-essential" work will be allowed again - but I don't think its nearly as reasonable to assume that a few dozen people will want to be sitting in 'theatre-style' chairs, lined up right next to one another straight away.

In other words, it looks like training is going to be quite different now - at least for a while. Lets say, for the sake of putting a number on it, at least 6 months - but that feels somewhat optimistic. More realistically, I think we're looking at some point in early 2021.

Similarly, I don't think people are going to be too happy sitting in a 'hotdesking' office at a desk that someone else was sitting at the day before - at least, not without first wiping down the desk, chair and any other surfaces with some sort of anti-viral wipes. (The job of the cleaners who go round office buildings late at night/early in the morning just got a lot more important to a lot more people...)

And why do people go into the offices in the first place? Once the big unscheduled 'working from home' experiment is over and people should have proved that they are able to get their work done remotely (at least, for an office like mine which has been putting 'flexible working' into place over the last few years), the main reason seems to be for meetings. Are people going to want to spend an hour sitting around a big table, in a chair (which almost definitely won't have been cleaned down since the last person sat there) closer than two metres to the people on either side? Are those who need to use public transport to get there in the first place going to want to do that if they can possibly avoid it? (I started driving to work to avoid it at the end of last year for different reasons...) Given how often meetings get arranged and then cancelled, how many people are going to want to go to the office on a day when they only have a single meeting planned? How many people are going to be spending a few months not commuting to work and decide that while they appreciate the social side of a day in the office, they don't want to make it the default any more - maybe thinking about all the other things they might want to do with the cost of a season ticket...

Anyway - I'm going to leave the 'future of office work' to think about another day. For now, I'm thinking about how to turn training sessions that I used to run by being in a room in front of a screen and talking to a bunch of people into something that doesn't involve being in a room with a bunch of people.

Live, online - over Skype/Zoom/Teams/GoToMeeting/Hangouts/Houseparty/WhatsApp/etc.? I've run training sessions over this kind of platform before (running a session for people in a different continent that I didn't really want to fly to)... This feels like the default option - I think it works OK when the people you're talking to are all in the same room and you still have "an audience" who can look over each others shoulder, or if something isn't clear to them can look around the room and see if anyone else is looking puzzled. But if everyone is on their own, I think its just too easy to lose the thread - maybe you miss something, maybe you get distracted by the children in your house, maybe your connection cuts out for a few important seconds and you miss a key piece of information.
Powerpoint with notes - ie. rewritten slides. I use Powerpoint slides as a combination of visual aid and reminder of what I'm planning on talking about - but my slides alone don't really carry all the information that the 'presentation' would include. So, I could rewrite them to be something to read, rather than a kind of "lecture accessory".
eBook - Essentially the same idea, but replacing "slides" with "pages". (Because nobody ever begins a sentence on one slide and finishes it on the next - unless they are trying to do something clever with a follow on sentence clause. So I guess they do... OK - nobody ever broke a hyphenated work and split it over two Powerpoint slides like they do with pages.) My point being - writing the same thing in Powerpoint or Word imposes certain norms and conventions on the structure of what you're writing, even if the finished version ends up being a PDF document. (If I were writing this as a powerpoint presentation, no bullet point would be this long or meandering. Perhaps for the best...)
Prerecorded video presentation - better, I think, than a video call/presentation; losing the opportunity for audience feedback (which I can't help feel is kind of broken by the online format anyway), but giving the audience members the ability to pause, rewind etc. I used to have a Lynda.com subscription, and I found their videos really useful; the transcription that ran alongside the video that you could click to jump to a particular point in the script was really useful. (Lynda.com has now become Linkedin Learning, and I assume the technology is the same.)

I think I'm leaning towards either ebook or prerecorded video presentation at the moment, so I'm thinking I might try both out and see what works best. The Data Visualisation session is a condensed version of a bigger 'workshop'-type session, so being pretty short means its pretty well suited for this kind of experiment… which raises a question about timing. For a 'deliverable' like an ebook or video, does it make sense to condense the material to fit into a particular amount of time? You don't need to worry about the people in the room (ie. giving everyone regular breaks to that those who want to can go to the toilet, get a drink, smoke etc.) or other presenters (there's not much worse than watching the guy before you as their '20 minute talk' runs past the half hour mark, especially when your talk is the last one before coffee/lunch/the end of the day) - which makes your time a bit more efficient/effective, but what does that mean if you're replacing a 20 minute presentation with a book or video without any constraints on how much material it should contain? Is it more respectful to your audience to keep it short and concise and take as little of their time as possible - or to offer them additional information and let them take it in at their own pace? Maybe a separation of 'core' and 'supplemental' material makes more sense?

Hopefully when the Easter holidays start next week, I'll be able to find some time to give them both a shot. Although how I'm going to make a recording while also sharing a house with two kids who are already badly in need of some outdoor time is anyones guess...

Some Random Nerd