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MINHAZ KAZI: Welcome to DataVis DevTalk.
I'm your host, Minhaz Kazi.
Our today's guest is Evan Snary.
Evan is one of the winners of the Visualize 2030 contest.
He's a college student at McMaster University
in Ontario, Canada.
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So tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
What are you busy with these days?
EVAN SNARY: Yeah, so right now, I'm currently
attending McMaster University.
But right now I'm on internship, and at this internship,
I'm using Data Studio and using visualizations
to present data to our clients in a meaningful way.
MINHAZ KAZI: How did you become interested in data
visualization in the first place?
What got you into it?
EVAN SNARY: Yeah, so I think it all
started even before my internship, where
on Reddit, I'd always follow the subreddit
called Data is Beautiful, where people
post these visualizations to the community for them to showcase.
So I think that's really where it all began
and my interest came from.
MINHAZ KAZI: So you were interested in data
visualization even before like you started building vis.
But as you started building your own visualizations,
how did you get introduced to Data Studio?
And what has been your experience with this tool?
EVAN SNARY: Yeah, so to answer the first question,
I think at my current internship,
we use Data Studio to present data to our clients
and provide insights using this visualization software.
And I think stepping into the software, that my experience
has been great overall and its ease of use
really stepped out to me.
It just so easy to use.
And when I first started on my internship,
I had no experience with it, but yet, I
could still build these dashboards for our clientele.
That just shows how easy it really is to use.
MINHAZ KAZI: You use Data Studio and you
build a vis for the Visualize 2030 contest,
and that was actually one of the winning entries there.
So congrats on that.
EVAN SNARY: Thank you.
MINHAZ KAZI: Maybe you can take the audience through the vis
and tell them the story you are trying
to tell throughout the visualization.
EVAN SNARY: For sure, yeah, if you want to take a look here.
Yeah, so for my Visualize 2030 project,
I wanted to focus in on two of the SDGs of no poverty
and climate action.
So that's what I really focused on with my interactive vis.
So as you scroll down, I kind of showed
statistics on what's happening in the world today
and just bring awareness in general to what's happening.
And one of the key findings I found out
that 71% of the total worldwide emissions
come from these high income countries.
And we're actually noticing an increase with middle income
countries, as you can see here.
As they move from low income to middle income classification,
we're noticing huge CO2 emission increases
per capita for these nations.
So as you can see, I continued to add interactive vises
to my Data Studio project, as I really
wanted to give the audience a way to interact with it
and find their own conclusions to the problems.
And here, people are able to select an individual country
and really dive deeper into, say, a country of interest,
or if they want to see just in particular what's
happening in a certain region of the world,
they're able to see specifically what's
happening with the poverty improvement, GDP
growth, and climate action in these nations.
So I also included what must be done
and what can we do to make the problem better.
And I think the key takeaway for me,
was that we're going to need to find
a way for these low countries to develop sustainably,
whether that's through high income country
aid or worldwide international funding.
We're going to need to find a way for these low income
countries to develop sustainably,
so we don't decrease poverty, but also
increase climate action at the same time.
MINHAZ KAZI: What do you think about Data Studio
as a tool for anyone that's trying to do data storytelling
and trying to bring social change?
EVAN SNARY: Yeah, so I think really we all know
that words only go so far.
And I think providing insights through graphs or visuals
sometimes provides a better context on these social change
issues.
So I think Data Studio really provides an easy and accessible
way for people to use another platform to reach out
and try to provide change to these problems we
face in the world today.
MINHAZ KAZI: So for someone who's
just getting started with the tool, who's
someone that doesn't have any experience in building
their own data visualizations or doesn't
have that much experience in data storytelling,
how can they get started?
And what tips would you give them to have
a really compelling story?
EVAN SNARY: Right.
So I think that's something actually
that my co-workers always talk about a lot.
And I think the very first thing is just start simple.
Whether it's one graph or one bar chart
or one visualization for that matter,
it really doesn't matter where you start.
And I think building off that one visualization is important.
And don't try to do too much at once.
And really just start simple, and start with just anything,
really.
MINHAZ KAZI: Evan, thanks again for being on the show.
You can learn more about the Visualize 2030 contest
and look at the winning visualizations from the links
in the description.
For more Data Studio content, be sure to subscribe
to the ECB channel.
And you can always visit our site at developers.googl
e.com/datastudio.
Until next time, keep building more vis.
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