Infographic

Survivor 50 Preseason Alliances Viz

Dana Barnes

I am new to Survivor fandom. But to paraphrase Jeff Probst, I quickly dug deep.

My 2024 New Years resolution was to stop watching reality dating shows. Too problematic on so many fronts. So when the second season of The Traitors premiered and was gaining social media fanfare, I thought I would give reality competition a shake. I had never before seen Sandra or Parvati, but I was immediately intrigued. Who were these charismatic, intelligent, cunning women? (Answer: ‘QUEEN!’ and ‘QUEEN!!!’)

Survivor friends immediately gave me a syllabus, and the rest is history. I’m actually shocked to realize that the first episode I ever watched was not even two years ago, on February 28, 2024, for the Survivor 46 premiere. I mean, I literally mentioned Survivor in my wedding vows. It’s been a whirlwind 24 months.

Flash forward to today. I’ve kept up with the new seasons from 46 onward. I’ve watched probably 20 of the prior seasons based on Survivor community recommendations; David vs Goliath is truly a masterpiece. So, like many fans, I am stoked for Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans – the first all-returnee season since I’ve become a watcher, commemorating a huge milestone in the show’s 25-year history.

I’m so deep in the fandom now that I regularly listen to multiple Survivor recap podcasts. One of these is from Survivor alum Rob Cesternino, who now runs the podcast empire Rob Has a Podcast (RHAP). In the run-up to Season 50, RHAP has been airing “preseason interviews” with each of the 24 contestants. So even though it’s February now, these were filmed back in June – out in Fiji, after the cast has gathered and started to size each other up…but before they can actually talk, before they begin filming and playing the game officially.

The interviewer leading these episodes is Mike Bloom, and for each person he does a game of “Friend or Foe,” having them run down whether or not they want to work with every single other player who is also on the cast. These conversations have produced incredible content – but most importantly for me, incredible data. I immediately wanted to cross-compare interviews. Sure Aubrey doesn’t want to work with Q…but what does Q think? Ozzy wants to work with Cirie…but how many options does Cirie have?

So I took it upon myself to listen to each interview, transcribe how each interviewee rated their competitors, and make a determination of “friend” or “foe” based on either the label they gave – or (some people are cagey!) inferred by their sentiment. I tried a couple different ways to visualize this (a grid? a network diagram?) but wanted to land on something that was easy to read, visually interesting, and told you something about how well this person was likely to do on their tribe and overall.

Voila! My Survivor 50 Preseason Alliance Map infographic. Click here to expand – there is a lot of detail visualized about each player’s prior seasons, tribe assignment, mutual friends/foes, and quotes from interviews explaining their answer.

This image is actually huge. You can click here to zoom in.

One decision I made when doing this graphic was that everyone’s answer was forced to be binary. Some interviewees gave very clear “friend” or “foe” labels. Others were more elusive, and left the judgment up to interpretation. So to be completely transparent, I’ve documented the transcripts and my determinations here. (You’ll notice my raw transcripts have a lot of typos; I got the gist of each interview, but didn’t think it was worth my time to go back and edit my for spelling, punctuation, and all that. I’ve got a job lol.)

Pretty soon after I started this project, I realized I wasn’t the only one doing this analysis. Indeed RHAP themselves and the RHAP listenership have jumped on this data just as I did. (It’s incredible information! Truly, hats off to Mike Bloom.) But I think I’m doing something unique to make the data more digestible. Here are the only other vizzes I’ve seen out there. While thorough and accurate, I find them hard to read. Should I be looking at the rows or the columns? How can I quickly see what two players said about each other? What does this data tell me about each player’s position of strength vs weakness going in? I find my visual more intuitive, and frankly, easier on the eyeballs.

Here is how I’ve seen this same data elsewhere:

Hi RHAP! Amazing interviews & coverage! But I find this hard to read, and needed your voiceover to make sense of the big storylines.
This one’s from Reddit. Love the detail here when people give cagey answers. But ack, another matrix. I can’t make heads or tails of this without diligently studying each column and row.

I have some ideas of where I might want to post this, and potentially even print out IRL for a watch party. But please share any ideas you have for this to make its way to the Survivor data nerds community!

Eling’s Famous Seven Layer Dip: my first-ever recipe infographic

itsdatadana
Seven Layer Dip Infographic

Hot take? In general, recipes are pretty terrible information design. They’re written as if cooking follows a neat linear path. But what if there are steps that belong together? What work can simmer in the background while I multitask on an upcoming part? Where are the natural divisions of labor so another person can pitch in? Cooking a meal is 3-dimensional choreography; most recipes are flat, linear, one-way roads. 

(A couple notable exceptions: I love how HelloFresh breaks down their recipes in a visual, compact card with clear phases. Molly Baz’s Cook This Book helpfully chunks the recipe into its component goals, and uses neat QR codes for technique how-tos.)

The worst offenders are recipes that involve layering – like dips, lasagnas, desserts. The information on the page flows from top to bottom, all while you’re building in a dish from the bottom-up. I always end up with layers that are over-distributed, under-distributed, misplaced, or skipped altogether. It would be so much easier to see how the layers stack up as a visual, and follow along as you’re building alongside the image. Imagine that: A recipe that flows the same way my dish does.

Enter: Eling’s famous Seven Layer Dip. This impeccable dip comes from the mind & kitchen of Eling Tsai – who is an incredible home chef, a bona fide registered dietician, and one of my very best friends on this earth. I don’t have receipts from when she first shared this gem with me, but I have an iPhone note I created about 7 years ago which has been my layer dip bible over ever since. Not exaggerating, when I bring this dip to a party, the entire casserole dish is wiped completely clean.

A couple months ago, I got the idea that I wanted to do something with this cherished recipe. I was horrified by the idea of ever losing the iPhone Note. I wanted to memorialize the Seven Layer Dip as an infographic, forever living in internet permanence, for the world to be able to know how amazing Eling’s creation is. I sketched many, many ideas on loose printer paper around my house – I imagined blueprints, technical diagrams, all sorts of non-traditional recipe formats to really visualize how the end product comes together.

Unfortunately, there was a problem. I had all these ideas, but not the design skills to get even close to executing it. My background is in Tableau, slides, and spreadsheets. The vision in my brain was beyond the limit of what my PowerPoint skills (while mighty!) could do. 

After a little research on what tools could bring my concept to life, I settled on Adobe Illustrator. Am I saying I took an entire summer quarter class at UCLA so I could make a Seven Layer Dip infographic? I’d say this is 50% true; this recipe infographic was more so the final straw that pushed me to learn something beyond my current means. But, y’all. I am only 4 weeks into this class and this is the level of what I’m able to create! I’m sure I will look back and nitpick it, but I’m really proud! I can’t wait to see what other infographic ideas I can unlock with this new toolkit. Here is the class info if others are interested.

Worry not – I am certainly not saying goodbye to the DataDana that brings you hypernerdy Tableau interactives. But I am excited to be able to broaden my dorky side project horizons. (And yes – I’ve even started using Illustrator at work. I can’t believe how much hacky stuff I was trying to do in Google Slides all these years!!)

Do you have any recipes that you wish were visualized? Anyone else loving Illustrator for their data work? Comment away, dataheads!

-Dd

P.S. For those learning Illustrator, know that it is taking lots of time and practice. It’s worth getting the hang of that frustrating pen tool, the mechanics of text wrapping, the value of well-organized layers. I’ve come a long way; check out my attempt to draw a bean in week 3.