Pieta Blakely and Eli Holder on Data Equity

The PolicyViz Podcast

Pieta Blakely, PhD helps mission-based organizations measure their impact so that they can do what they do well. She started her nonprofit career as a teacher in workforce development and adult basic education. It was important work and she was worried that they didn’t really know if they were doing it well. In the process of trying to answer that question, Pieta got a Masters in Education and a PhD in Social Policy, and became an evaluator.

Pieta has been an evaluator for over fifteen years, the past five of those as a consultant helping mission-based organizations use evaluation to build better and more effective programs. She believes that evaluation isn’t a test, it’s an ongoing process of trying things, measuring the results, and making adjustments. Her goal is to help build organizational cultures that thrive on joyful accountability and doing important work well.

Pieta is known for explaining complicated things clearly, an emphasis on ethics and justice in evaluation, an understanding of how not-for-profits work, and her unpredictable efforts in vegan and wheat-free baking.

You can read her blog at pietablakely.com or watch her live show, Coffee Time with Masterminds, where she talks about leading mission-based organizations through uncertain times.

Eli Holder is a dataviz designer, researcher, and founder of 3iap, a data visualization design firm. 3iap (3 is a pattern) specializes in psychologically effective information design, approachable analytics, and developing human-centered data products. If you’re a data designer, journalist, or analyst, Eli’s Equity-Oriented Dataviz Workshop can quickly teach your team how to visualize data on inequality, without reinforcing inequality. This covers not only his recent research, but also the underlying psychology and alternative design approaches to conventional (harmful) visualizations of racial outcome disparities.

Episode Notes

• Eli on Twitter
• Pieta on Twitter
• What can go wrong? Exploring racial equity dataviz and deficit thinking, with Pieta Blakely and Eli Holder
• Eli will present his paper (co-authored with Cindy Xiong) in October, at IEEE VIS 2022, but you can find a preview of the findings here: “Dispersion vs Disparity” Research Results: How masking uncertainty encourages stereotyping when visualizing social outcome disparities.
• Presenting data for a Targeted Universalist approach
• Pieta and Eli discuss data viz and equity: https://youtu.be/EcCRUXlgoOc