Data Visualization: A conversation with Lisa Waananen Jones, a graphics editor at The New York Times

Recently I have come across a mesmerizing discipline that has changed the landscape of communications and many other fields: data visualization. Data visualization is all about the message, aesthetics, and comprehensibility. The one-of-a-kind that introduced me to this growing discipline is Lisa Waananen Jones, a graphics editor at The New York Times and a scholarly associate professor of visual communication and journalism at Washington State University.

My conversation with Lisa, despite the clumsiness due to Zoom settings and the eight-thousand-mile distance between us, enlightened me as to data visualization.

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Hi, Professor Lisa. I know that I am your student who is taking your class on data visualization. So, if I come up and ask you what data viz is, you will give me an F. But, imagine that I am not your student and I know nothing about data, graphics, or communication. How would you explain to me data visualization?

That’s a very good question even if you are my student. One of the things I like the most about data visualization is its definition is somewhat changing because of technological advances. It is about solving the problem people had hundred years ago in different contexts and disciplines. It is about being able to understand data sets in a way that just looking at numbers doesn’t allow. Charts and graphs are easy ways to describe data visualization. But broadly, it is about how you understand the numbers when our brain is not always great at comprehending large numbers without visuals and other methods.

In your bio on Washington State University’s website, you said that data visualization gets to the core of civic journalism. Can you elaborate on it more, please?

Election graphics from news organizations are great examples of how data visualization gets to the core of civic journalism. They allow readers to see so much at once and explore what is going on nationally and locally. Another example is the COVID-19 data visualization project I am working on now with The New York Times. It is a global story, but what people often want to know on a daily basis is how the virus is where they live or where they want to go visit their grandparents. That is how the project serves the civic purpose. At this point, watching COVID-19 data is almost like watching the weather report. People check them every day. So, data visualization serves that goal of helping people to be able to understand the big trend and also the things where they live.

Data visualization gets to the core of civic journalism.

Tell me more about your experience with The New York Times. I know that you won multiple group project awards while working there, which was impressive. Who did you work with, and what did you do?

I started as an intern after grad school. At that time I had some data skills and graphic skills - pretty well, I thought - but I also learned a lot when I was there. Besides working with infographics, spreadsheets and data, I also did traditional reporting, calling sources and experts and asking, “Can you help us understand what’s showing up in this pattern?” Even when I had the data, I needed to be able to explain and interpret them for readers. That was the type of work for both daily projects (i.e., breaking news) and projects that might expand for a couple of weeks or even months.

For the past 18 months, I have been working with The New York Times again on COVID-19 data. That is a project that involves many, many people; I am just one small part of it. But, it has been gratifying to see how others think and take on problems - visual, data, and reporting problems.

What do you think will be the next big change or trend in data visualization?

One thing I am very excited about - it is not exactly new but, I think, will become bigger - is the expressive side of data visualization. We will see more artistic expression as sort of the equivalent of poetry or short story. There will be more genres, I guess, of data visualization. I also suspect there will be a backlash to how quantified our life has become. A lot of people have loved to be able to track their personal lives on their phones and apps. That will continue, but some may decide they don’t want to live a quantified life. Those numbers are preventing them from experiencing life the way they want to.

In journalism particularly, I think those who have been the pioneers in graphics rooms are becoming leaders in those newsrooms. For a long time, people asked for a graphic at the end of the process. But, now we are seeing in bigger newsrooms that graphics have become the center where the ideas come from and things are coordinated. That’s particularly true in The New York Times. Data visualization is no longer decoration that news organizations add at the end but the center of their reporting and storytelling

One example of "the artistic genre" of data visualization by Lisa Wannanen Jones. Her hand-snitched baby quilt represents NASA data tracking Earth's average surface temperature from 1880 to 2018, compared to a late‑1800s pre‑industrial baseline.

(Courtesy: WSU Insider)

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I ended the conversation with Professor Lisa, wishing her a wonderful day and seeing myself being awakened in the middle of the night by the magnificence of data visualization. And I meant it, as I was searching through her website, looking at her works all done with intelligence, meticulousness, and technology-saviness.

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Date published: September 27, 2021

Programs used: Word & Grammarly

Brief description: An overview of data visualization with The New York Times graphics editor.

Reflection: This third blog of the series is one of the posts I enjoyed writing the most. I learned several valuable experiences including setting up an interview via Zoom and editing responses.

References: (links are all inserted above.)