Two-n

We are excited to announce our #Outlier2024 Lightning Talk speakers! Join us in Chicago or online from June 12-14. Dues-paying DVS Members enjoy special discounts! Get tickets: outlierconf.com. Meet our lightning talk speakers: Emilia Ruzicka, a data journalist with the talk: "Practical Tactics for Gender Inclusivity in Data Reporting" Hyeok Kim, a human-computer interaction and visualization researcher with the talk: "Show Your Data with Sound using Erie" Alex Gurvich, a graphics Designer for NASA with the talk: "Communicating Actionable Earth Science at the Earth Information Center" Kenneth Field, The Vice-Chair of the ICA Map Design Commission with the talk: "Mapbusters: Breaking the rules in cartography" Kevin Ford, Senior Manager of Business Intelligence at Discover Financial Services with the talk: "Forget About Dashboards and Solve the Business Problem" Martynas Jočys, a Data and Analytics Consultant with the talk: "Sometimes less is just less" Janina Madoff, Senior Business Intelligence Analyst at NorthShore University HealthSystem with the talk: "User-friendly Visual of Future Hospital Volume for Staff Optimization" Hermann Zschiegner, award winner and the principal at TWO-N, INC with the talk: "Fragmented Memory – Explaining the Inexplicable" Sam Hart, a data visualization developer Reuters with the talk: "This is not Havana, Cuba" Kuhu Gupta, a Data Visualization Engineer at Illumio with the talk: "Tiny Titans of Data: The Mighty Impact of Micro Visualization" Sophie Sparkes, a Information Designer and community manager at The Information Lab and Taha Ebrahimi, The director of Tableau with the talk: "Machine Meets Illustration: Our Medium Is Data" #outlier2024 #dataviz #datavisualization

At TWO-N we love exploring data and we are passionate about music. We've been reading all the articles about Beyoncé’s new album and we were intrigued by The Pudding article, https://lnkd.in/gggASbzR by Jan Diehm and Jada Watson. It may take Beyoncé’s celebrity to break through country radio’s Black glass ceiling. According to their analysis, most female artists of color face an uphill climb getting air time. Diehm and Watson analyzed 182,848 songs played by 29 country radio stations over 19 days. Twenty-four of the stations didn’t air anything by a Black female artist. The five others used songs by Black women 14 times. One of them was Whitney Houston’s 1991 rendition of the national anthem. The 13 other plays were all Tiera Kennedy’s “Found It in You” from 2022. Here at TWO-N, we analyzed Beyoncé’s 20-year solo career and showed how the pop superstar used more and more rap in her songs over time. https://lnkd.in/ecxEH952 We also tapped into concert data to document that Taylor Swift in her Eras Tour stayed on stage far longer than Bruce Springsteen, famous for his marathon performances, https://lnkd.in/eKEZJQyc. Diehm calculated that you’d have to listen to a country station 32 days to hear one song by a Black woman — and it would probably be the same one you heard a month earlier. We hope Beyoncé's new “Cowboy Carter” album will be a game changer for Black women on country radio.

At TWO-N we love exploring data and we are passionate about music. We've been reading all the articles about Beyoncé’s new album and we were intrigued by The Pudding article, https://lnkd.in/gggASbzR by Jan Diehm and Jada Watson. It may take Beyoncé’s celebrity to break through country radio’s Black glass ceiling. According to their analysis, most female artists of color face an uphill climb getting air time. Diehm and Watson analyzed 182,848 songs played by 29 country radio stations over 19 days. Twenty-four of the stations didn’t air anything by a Black female artist. The five others used songs by Black women 14 times. One of them was Whitney Houston’s 1991 rendition of the national anthem. The 13 other plays were all Tiera Kennedy’s “Found It in You” from 2022. Here at TWO-N, we analyzed Beyoncé’s 20-year solo career and showed how the pop superstar used more and more rap in her songs over time. https://lnkd.in/ecxEH952 We also tapped into concert data to document that Taylor Swift in her Eras Tour stayed on stage far longer than Bruce Springsteen, famous for his marathon performances, https://lnkd.in/eKEZJQyc. Diehm calculated that you’d have to listen to a country station 32 days to hear one song by a Black woman — and it would probably be the same one you heard a month earlier. We hope Beyoncé's new “Cowboy Carter” album will be a game changer for Black women on country radio.

We at TWO-N, INC are delighted to report we won our second The Anthem Awards. It was for a project we undertook amid the pandemic in 2020. We used New York City subway data to document how front-line workers like first responders, nurses, and teachers were still taking the subway while more affluent people avoided public transit. https://lnkd.in/eTgm7sjp The Anthem Awards recognize mission-driven online work. They are an offshoot of the The Webby Awards, the internet’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards. The organization honored our project for best use of data in the diversity, equity, and inclusion category. We can’t overstate how important it is to be honored. Yes, we are in business to make a living. But we also hope to make a difference using data visualizations to tell important stories. In this case, we tapped into the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s turnstile data. It records how many people enter and leave the subway system at each of the almost 500 stations. The data showed how the number of MetroCard swipes plunged from the normal 30 million a week to just 10 million in the first week of March 2020 as the Covid shutdowns began. Then ridership dwindled to 2.4 million by the first week of April, when there were almost 4,000 Covid deaths in the city. Subway traffic held at low levels for the next several weeks. But ridership didn’t go to zero. Roughly 13% of pre-pandemic traffic held up. We wondered who was still riding the subway. The MTA data couldn’t tell us that. To make inferences about the remaining riders, we turned to U.S. Census Bureau data showing income and other demographic information by ZIP code. We overlaid that on our map of the subway system showing ridership at each station. This graphically documented the deep racial and economic inequalities of the city. For example, ridership at stations in Lower Manhattan’s affluent, overwhelmingly White Tribeca-Soho-Civic Center neighborhood plunged 88–97% at the peak of the quarantine. By contrast, subway traffic in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood held up at almost a third of the pre-pandemic level. The population in that area is 99% non-White, with 32% living below the poverty line and 40% working in education, health, and social services. Our further analysis of ridership by subway station found that more people in non-White neighborhoods, areas with higher poverty, and places where fewer people had health benefits were still using the public transit system. Our data visualization also enabled users to drill down by subway line and by neighborhood. All in all, it was a complex analysis of multiple datasets and a challenging data visualization. We’re proud of the work and the story we were able to tell. We took a fresh look at the data this week. Four years later, subway traffic still hasn’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Aucher Serr Monroe Getz Hermann Zschiegner

Web-based data visualizations can be artistic AND utilitarian. Take our recent project for the Hospital for Special Surgery. The massive, 160-year-old New York-based medical institution engaged TWO-N, INC to create touch-screen research tools for a new analytics and research center. The video screens were going into a gorgeous new space for the organization’s Center for Analytics, Modeling and Performance designed by architecture firm, Mapos Architects, DPC. They had to be serious research tools, and they had to look great to fit into the modernistic setting. The Hospital for Special Surgery performs 35,000 orthopedic procedures every year at 24 locations all over the New York City area and in Connecticut, New Jersey, Florida and Colombia. Its website lists doctors practicing at least two dozen specialties. All of that activity generates tons of data on patients, procedures, diagnostic and other visits, lab and radiology tests, and medications, among other things. Our developer Parker Kaufmann took the lead and worked with development chief James Proctor, project manager Angela Denny and our creative director Hermann Zschiegner. We produced three major applications. One is a long, skinny screen that continuously scrolls real-time data on the status of waiting areas, operating rooms and post-op recovery units at all locations. Areas that need attention appear in red, flagging the analytics staff. We call it the ticker. The second sprawls across five huge screens in the center’s Data 360 space. These amount to sophisticated research tools because analysts can drill down into the data to gain insights into demand over time for specific services, patient volumes by service and location, where patients come from for each location, activity by doctor, and a wide range of other criteria. There are 10 filter types altogether. As we were installing the application, we did user testing with data analyst, physicians, and stakeholders who provided feedback. It’s a powerful management tool. The third application dominates the wall next to the analytics center’s entrance and delivers quite a “wow” factor. We call it the art piece because it provides an abstract, animated view of all kinds of data associated with the institution. The constantly changing images may look like blossoms or Rorschach inkblots. They zoom in on key categories like spinal or foot and ankle surgery, depicting numbers of patients, visits, doctors, medicines, and diagnoses. The panel provides a visualization of the entire institution. #datavisualization #healthcare #touchscreens