How we can find ourselves in data | Giorgia Lupi

112,335 views ・ 2017-05-04

TED


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00:12
This is what my last week looked like.
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What I did,
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who I was with,
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the main sensations I had for every waking hour ...
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If the feeling came as I thought of my dad
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who recently passed away,
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or if I could have just definitely avoided the worries and anxieties.
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And if you think I'm a little obsessive,
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you're probably right.
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But clearly, from this visualization,
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you can learn much more about me than from this other one,
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which are images you're probably more familiar with
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and which you possibly even have on your phone right now.
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Bar charts for the steps you walked,
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pie charts for the quality of your sleep --
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the path of your morning runs.
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In my day job, I work with data.
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I run a data visualization design company,
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and we design and develop ways to make information accessible
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through visual representations.
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What my job has taught me over the years
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is that to really understand data and their true potential,
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sometimes we actually have to forget about them
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and see through them instead.
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Because data are always just a tool we use to represent reality.
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They're always used as a placeholder for something else,
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but they are never the real thing.
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But let me step back for a moment
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to when I first understood this personally.
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In 1994, I was 13 years old.
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I was a teenager in Italy.
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I was too young to be interested in politics,
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but I knew that a businessman, Silvio Berlusconi,
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was running for president for the moderate right.
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We lived in a very liberal town,
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and my father was a politician for the Democratic Party.
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And I remember that no one thought that Berlusconi could get elected --
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that was totally not an option.
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But it happened.
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And I remember the feeling very vividly.
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It was a complete surprise,
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as my dad promised that in my town he knew nobody who voted for him.
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This was the first time
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when the data I had gave me a completely distorted image of reality.
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My data sample was actually pretty limited and skewed,
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so probably it was because of that, I thought, I lived in a bubble,
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and I didn't have enough chances to see outside of it.
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Now, fast-forward to November 8, 2016
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in the United States.
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The internet polls,
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statistical models,
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all the pundits agreeing on a possible outcome for the presidential election.
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It looked like we had enough information this time,
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and many more chances to see outside the closed circle we lived in --
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but we clearly didn't.
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The feeling felt very familiar.
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I had been there before.
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I think it's fair to say the data failed us this time --
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and pretty spectacularly.
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We believed in data,
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but what happened,
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even with the most respected newspaper,
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is that the obsession to reduce everything to two simple percentage numbers
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to make a powerful headline
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made us focus on these two digits
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and them alone.
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In an effort to simplify the message
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and draw a beautiful, inevitable red and blue map,
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we lost the point completely.
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We somehow forgot that there were stories --
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stories of human beings behind these numbers.
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In a different context,
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but to a very similar point,
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a peculiar challenge was presented to my team by this woman.
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She came to us with a lot of data,
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but ultimately she wanted to tell one of the most humane stories possible.
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She's Samantha Cristoforetti.
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She has been the first Italian woman astronaut,
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and she contacted us before being launched
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on a six-month-long expedition to the International Space Station.
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She told us, "I'm going to space,
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and I want to do something meaningful with the data of my mission
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to reach out to people."
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A mission to the International Space Station
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comes with terabytes of data
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about anything you can possibly imagine --
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the orbits around Earth,
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the speed and position of the ISS
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and all of the other thousands of live streams from its sensors.
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We had all of the hard data we could think of --
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just like the pundits before the election --
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but what is the point of all these numbers?
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People are not interested in data for the sake of it,
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because numbers are never the point.
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They're always the means to an end.
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The story we needed to tell
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is that there is a human being in a teeny box
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flying in space above your head,
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and that you can actually see her with your naked eye on a clear night.
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So we decided to use data to create a connection
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between Samantha and all of the people looking at her from below.
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We designed and developed what we called "Friends in Space,"
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a web application that simply lets you say "hello" to Samantha
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from where you are,
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and "hello" to all the people who are online at the same time
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from all over the world.
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And all of these "hellos" left visible marks on the map
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as Samantha was flying by
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and as she was actually waving back every day at us
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using Twitter from the ISS.
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This made people see the mission's data from a very different perspective.
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It all suddenly became much more about our human nature and our curiosity,
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rather than technology.
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So data powered the experience,
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but stories of human beings were the drive.
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The very positive response of its thousands of users
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taught me a very important lesson --
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that working with data means designing ways
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to transform the abstract and the uncountable
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into something that can be seen, felt and directly reconnected
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to our lives and to our behaviors,
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something that is hard to achieve
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if we let the obsession for the numbers and the technology around them
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lead us in the process.
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But we can do even more to connect data to the stories they represent.
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We can remove technology completely.
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A few years ago, I met this other woman,
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Stefanie Posavec --
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a London-based designer who shares with me the passion and obsession about data.
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We didn't know each other,
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but we decided to run a very radical experiment,
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starting a communication using only data,
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no other language,
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and we opted for using no technology whatsoever to share our data.
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In fact, our only means of communication
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would be through the old-fashioned post office.
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For "Dear Data," every week for one year,
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we used our personal data to get to know each other --
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personal data around weekly shared mundane topics,
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from our feelings
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to the interactions with our partners,
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from the compliments we received to the sounds of our surroundings.
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Personal information that we would then manually hand draw
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on a postcard-size sheet of paper
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that we would every week send from London to New York,
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where I live,
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and from New York to London, where she lives.
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The front of the postcard is the data drawing,
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and the back of the card
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contains the address of the other person, of course,
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and the legend for how to interpret our drawing.
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The very first week into the project,
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we actually chose a pretty cold and impersonal topic.
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How many times do we check the time in a week?
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So here is the front of my card,
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and you can see that every little symbol
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represents all of the times that I checked the time,
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positioned for days and different hours chronologically --
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nothing really complicated here.
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But then you see in the legend
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how I added anecdotal details about these moments.
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In fact, the different types of symbols indicate why I was checking the time --
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what was I doing?
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Was I bored? Was I hungry?
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Was I late?
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Did I check it on purpose or just casually glance at the clock?
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And this is the key part --
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representing the details of my days and my personality
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through my data collection.
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Using data as a lens or a filter to discover and reveal, for example,
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my never-ending anxiety for being late,
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even though I'm absolutely always on time.
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Stefanie and I spent one year collecting our data manually
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to force us to focus on the nuances that computers cannot gather --
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or at least not yet --
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using data also to explore our minds and the words we use,
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and not only our activities.
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Like at week number three,
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where we tracked the "thank yous" we said and were received,
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and when I realized that I thank mostly people that I don't know.
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Apparently I'm a compulsive thanker to waitresses and waiters,
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but I definitely don't thank enough the people who are close to me.
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Over one year,
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the process of actively noticing and counting these types of actions
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became a ritual.
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It actually changed ourselves.
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We became much more in tune with ourselves,
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much more aware of our behaviors and our surroundings.
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Over one year, Stefanie and I connected at a very deep level
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through our shared data diary,
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but we could do this only because we put ourselves in these numbers,
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adding the contexts of our very personal stories to them.
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It was the only way to make them truly meaningful
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and representative of ourselves.
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I am not asking you to start drawing your personal data,
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or to find a pen pal across the ocean.
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But I'm asking you to consider data --
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all kind of data --
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as the beginning of the conversation
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and not the end.
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Because data alone will never give us a solution.
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And this is why data failed us so badly --
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because we failed to include the right amount of context
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to represent reality --
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a nuanced, complicated and intricate reality.
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We kept looking at these two numbers,
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obsessing with them
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and pretending that our world could be reduced
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to a couple digits and a horse race,
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while the real stories,
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the ones that really mattered,
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were somewhere else.
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What we missed looking at these stories only through models and algorithms
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is what I call "data humanism."
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In the Renaissance humanism,
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European intellectuals
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placed the human nature instead of God at the center of their view of the world.
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I believe something similar needs to happen
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with the universe of data.
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Now data are apparently treated like a God --
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keeper of infallible truth for our present and our future.
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The experiences that I shared with you today
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taught me that to make data faithfully representative of our human nature
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and to make sure they will not mislead us anymore,
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we need to start designing ways to include empathy, imperfection
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and human qualities
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in how we collect, process, analyze and display them.
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I do see a place where, ultimately,
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instead of using data only to become more efficient,
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we will all use data to become more humane.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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