Sprint 1 with AnecData

We are Team AnecData from Digital Society School, Amsterdam. The team is on the ‘Data Driven Transformation’ track and currently working on a project initiating the merging and integration of different data sets to create new frameworks between public health from GGD and environmental factors. Abdo is our awesome, aspiring coach. The rest of the team is composed of five wonderful people:

• Charlotte from USA (designer)
• Dania from the Netherlands (qualitative social researcher)
• Sıla from Turkey (quantitative social researcher)
• Merlijn form the Netherlands (web programmer)
• Diego from Spain (coder)

With this short article, we want to guide you through our journey of becoming a team and slowly diving into the project.

Let’s start with the name of the team. “AnecData” is the plural form of anecdote. Our team has a connection to the word anecdote because it relates back to real stories about people. As a team, we want to harness the data in a way that connects human experience to complicated data sets.

In this first sprint, our aim was to understand the project a little bit better since the topic is very broad. Naturally, everyone was feeling up in the air. We were unsure about not only the expectations of our partners but also our own expectations for the project. In order to have a more grounded understanding of the project, we decided to start with a literature review in which we looked for different concepts related to our problem. We researched the available data in GGD’s website and their way of visualizing the public health data, alternative data visualization techniques from various examples, and the inclusivity in design. During this period, we explored different data sets that include both public health and environmental factors of Amsterdam. We found various environmental data sets from the municipality’s website. This research allowed the team to get familiar with the concept of the project in depth.

With the insight we gained from the literature review, we got together for a flashy brainstorming session in which the following final question was formulated.

“What is the relationship between the public health data and living condition data?”

WHY?

Public health is without a doubt influenced by non-health-related sectors. Therefore, the communication of various sectors and the health sector is vital. There is still a need for the integration of different data sets that might potentially relate to public health issues with having a broader aspect of health and well-being. As a team, we decided to focus on environmental factors.

(Whispering: we could not ignore the influence of GGD guiding us to pick the environmental factors… but in the end, everyone was happy about this decision.)

During this brainstorm session, three questions were collectively set to be explored regardless of the end product.

1. How to use gamification to experience the stories included in the dataset?
2. How to view the data in a way that inspires a call to action?
3. How to make people find themselves/ identify with the data?

In the next step, the team was divided into three groups. (1) The programmers (Diego and Merlijn) started researching on tools and techniques for web-based data visualization. (2) Charlotte, our designer, started creating the presentation and also some examples of data visualization with arbitrary data. Meanwhile, (3) the researchers (Dania and Sıla) conducted qualitative research to get more insight into people’s perception of their health and how it is affected by their living environment.

1) Tools and Methods

During the technical research, Diego and Merlijn found the best tools and methods that will allow us to create dynamic web-based data visualizations. As a data visualization library, Data-Driven Documents (D3) is a very convenient tool at this stage of the project since it allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM) which is a logical-tree representation of a document. DOM allows you to apply data-driven transformations to the document. It is possible to use D3 not only to generate an HTML table from an array of numbers but also to use the same data to create an interactive SVG bar chart with gentle transitions and interactions.

In the end, we decided to focus on D3, SVG, and CSS. By using a range of tools and methods, we aim to provide users with a smooth interface where they can interact and connect with data.

2) Data visualization examples

Our talented designer created these pretty (but completely fake) data visualization examples while trying to hide from the other team members watching her with admiration.

3) Research

To gain more insight into people’s perception of the relationship between public health and living environment, Dania and Sila conducted qualitative research. Our participants included seven members of DSS from different professional and cultural backgrounds. The in-depth interviews were semi-structured. Throughout our research, they investigated potential answers for the following questions:

• To what extent people are aware of the potential impact of environmental factors on their health?
• Are people interested in the relationship between public health and the environment?
• To what extent are people involved in building a better living environment for themselves? (intentionally or not)
• How can we make people more involved/interested in this relationship?
• To what extent people were informed about GGD?

This study provided valuable information not only on perceptions of connection of health and environment but also on people’s familiarity with GGD and the available public health data. The results will help us to decide which direction we should take as the project advances.

Next steps:

We had a very useful translation session with Emma who helped us to clarify our thoughts on “where we are” and “what are the next steps”. While we were explaining our process and research, four different pathways appeared.

1. We can narrow the project down to one single topic and only focus on that particular topic throughout the rest of the project.
2. We can organize a contest for people to find the most significant (not statistical but personal correlations between the public health and environmental variables. Again, an interactive interface where we upload different data sets can provide users with the right tool to play around with different data sets and variables.
3. We can create a “How well you know your city” quiz using an interactive data visualization asking people to guess some facts of Public Health data. After we collect their assumptions, we will show the real numbers and correlations. For this method, we can also collect data on the potential variation between what people think, their perception, and the reality as given by the data. Individual experiences can influence our perceptions. The results of the quiz can provide us with an insight into how citizens of Amsterdam really perceive their city.
4. Finally, we can look back to the literature and find already proven causalities between public health and environmental factors because the data we will with cannot produce any causality. Then, we can check if the available data supports these relationships.

We decided to build a website to present all our ideas and the results of our research to DSS and the GGD. We created a very pretty website (thanks to Charlotte and Merlijn) showing all our work as well as our options for next steps. From now on, you can track our work and explore more detailed information here.

At the end of the first three weeks, we pulled off our sprint review with partners and the track owner. We received very positive and constructive feedback and suggestions on our work that will definitely help us in the next sprint.

Until next time amigos…

The Digital Society School is a growing community of learners, creators and designers who create meaningful impact on society and its global digital transformation. Check us out at digitalsocietyschool.org.