{"id":4669,"date":"2023-01-19T11:35:47","date_gmt":"2023-01-19T10:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kingkong-mag.com\/karim-douieb\/"},"modified":"2023-02-07T15:16:09","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T14:16:09","slug":"karim-douieb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kingkong-mag.com\/en\/karim-douieb\/","title":{"rendered":"Karim Douieb, data-famished"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nWhen he is not analysing data packets for his clients, Karim Douieb endeavours to give life to them visually. The Brussels inhabitant is also establishing contacts with data journalism, once again with the aim of giving voice to these data.\n\r\n<\/p>\n\n\n

When we meet in his Etterbeek office, it is naturally with a diagram that he introduces himself. More than a job-conditioned mannerism, Karim is dyslexic as well. \u2018I have great difficulty in expressing myself in words. The visual has always been more intuitive for me.\u2019 His career history however began at the opposite end of the visual spectrum. After gaining a Bachelor\u2019s degree in computer science at the Universit\u00e9 Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) twenty years ago, the Brussels based analyst continued into academia with a doctorate, followed by postdoctoral studies which led him to Canada. For years he never defined himself as a creative and didn\u2019t write a single line of code. \u2018I was doing conceptual informatics. It was very abstract, but these algorithms still come in useful for me today.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was only once he had abandoned research and set up home in London that he laid his hands on data for the first time. \u2018I was working for a company which collected a staggering variety of data for advertisers, as a means of checking if the number of views a campaign gets is contractually respected, for example. I very quickly became frustrated by not being able to do much by way of processing these huge volumes of data and the trends I was discovering in them. The marketing aspect of my job gave me no pleasure whatsoever, but it was there I became hooked on the analytical aspect of data and, a little later, on dataviz.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018Dataviz grabs the eye and often allows a less informed audience to grasp issues which would be a lot harder to get their head around by using words.\u2019<\/p>\nKarim Douieb<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For this, read data visualisation. A discipline which consists of representing qualitative but above all quantitative statistical data by means of graphics. \u2018The aim is always to extract the trends within the data packets we comb through and to make them visually accessible to a large audience. Dataviz grabs the eye and often allows a less informed audience to grasp issues which would be a lot harder to get their head around using words.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00a9 Karim Douieb<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If he deplores the scarcity of design or data visualisation option courses in computer science curricula \u2013 even fewer when he was a student, he points out \u2013 data visualisation remains a sideline in his everyday life. Having returned to the country of his birth, he developed his expertise, got together with four friends every bit as data-crazy as he is, and in 2017 they founded Jetpack.AI<\/a>. A data analytics company which today has 17 employees working for it. \u2018The vast majority of our work involves analytics for very varied organisations such as the Flemish government, the Prime Minister\u2019s Office, or Brussels Airport. It is very rare to sell a pure dataviz project. The visual aspect is always the icing on the cake regarding the data analytics our clients commission from us.\u2019 With a single exception: journalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data X journalism<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

His Cartesian spirit hadn\u2019t imagined becoming involved with the field of journalism, but gradually the data scientist came to people\u2019s notice thanks to his interactive computer graphics. One October evening in 2019, Karim caught sight of a Tweet by Laura Trump, the daughter-in-law of the 45th<\/sup> President of the United States. \u2018Try to impeach this,\u2019 she protested, linking her Tweet to a distorted electoral map. \u2018The computer graphic represented thousands of square kilometres of land empty of inhabitants supposedly in favour of\u00a0 Trump. I was outraged to see these distorted maps escalating across the social networks. I am not involved in politics, but I wanted to correct this visual error.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenge accepted! Here is a transition between surface area of US counties and their associated population. This arguably provides a much more accurate reading of the situation. @observablehq<\/a> notebook: https:\/\/t.co\/wdfMeV5hO4<\/a> #HowChartsLie<\/a> #DataViz<\/a> #d3js<\/a> https:\/\/t.co\/lStHeeuMUw<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/MpYiXtsHmu<\/a><\/p>\u2014 Karim Dou\u00efeb (@karim_douieb) October 8, 2019<\/a><\/blockquote>