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You may think of R as a tool for complex statistical analysis, but it's much more than that. From data visualization to efficient reporting, to improving your workflow, R can do it all. On this podcast, I talk with people about how they use R in unique and creative ways.
Hi. I'm David Keyes, and I run R for the Rest of Us. You may think of R as a tool for complex statistical analysis, but it's much more than that. From data visualization to efficient reporting to improving your workflow, R can do it all. On this podcast, I talk with people about how they use R in unique and creative ways.
David Keyes:I'm delighted to be joined today by Cedric Viddone. Cedric Vidon is an information management officer at UNHCR, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. And Cedric specializes in data visualization. With over 15 years of experience in the humanitarian sector, Cedric has developed a wide range of data driven products from infographics to reports and maps while also contributing to data visualization guidelines, templates, and standards. Beginning his journey in 2008 with a focus on mapping, he's since expanded his expertise into complex infographics and data visualization.
David Keyes:And recently, Cedric embraced R transitioning from a design centric approach and has developed a few R packages to support the growing UNHCR R community. Cedric, welcome, and thanks for joining me.
Cedric Viddone:Yeah. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. Super excited.
David Keyes:Well, I am, excited for people to learn more about you and the really interesting work, that you do. Because I spoke with Ahmadou Dikko on a previous episode who I know you work with. We are talking some about, the kind of design work that you have done and and how that's fit, in with with the work at UNHCR. But before we get to that, I'd love to know you know, I talked a bit about your background, but if you can kind of give me, like, the cliff notes, short version of your background and how you've ended up working at UNHCR doing the type of work that you do today.
Cedric Viddone:So yeah. So as we mentioned, I'm currently, information management officer, specializing in data visualization at UNHCR. I'm based here in Geneva, Switzerland. I've been doing the humanitarian work for over 15 years. I started in 2008 back in New York, actually, with another UN agency, and I started as a Nitin.
Cedric Viddone:It was an internship during my master degree in GIS. So I have a background in geography and GIS, and I started as an intern within the UN system making maps. I was a cartographer at the time. So I started making maps for the UN, and it went really well. And my boss over there, she was really interested in design, infographics, and data visualization set.
Cedric Viddone:So that's all I kind of, like, transitioned to not only making maps, but making information products that were including maps, charts, some narrative, a real context about the situation and everything. So that's all kind of, like, slide from only making maps to making more complex than, I would say, design centered information product. So that's kind of like this slow slide I did through data visualization, and it became my bread and butter. I got really hooked up onto it, so I just, you know, started to do everything I was making. Always add some maps component, but add more and more design, charts, plots, and everything.
Cedric Viddone:As you mentioned, that was always kind of like a more static approach, you know, the the typical way of going into a GIS software, making a map, exporting it in Illustrator, polishing it, then doing charts there, blah blah. A lot of manual work, but that's that's been the way of doing infographic within the UN for quite a long time, and I think it's still the case. And then I started working for another other agency, UNHCR. When I started back in 2,000 13, there are no people doing visualization at UNHCR. So it was really the beginning.
Cedric Viddone:There there was no real brand at the time neither, so that was really something kind of new. Information product were always there, but more in the format of a PowerPoint or data or information like this. But, yes, I I started, and we build then more guidelines, templates, and tools, and all the things we're gonna a bit discuss today. And, yeah.
David Keyes:I'm curious, like, can you give me, I don't know, a couple examples, of, say, when you first started working at the UN as an intern, what were the types of maps that you were making? What does the UN wanna see mapped?
Cedric Viddone:Basically, it was when there was an an earthquake happening somewhere. You would just map where the earthquake happened, which was the most affected areas, and these kind of things. Or when you have a first displacement of people, where do they move first, what border crossing points did they take, and this kind of thing. The idea was to be always super quick. And so, basically, when it happened after the a day or two afterwards, we had a map and everything that we could show on it and stuff like this.
Cedric Viddone:It was not super detailed and everything, but at least, information was there, and you could see it visually and geographically where it was happening in the world and or or, you know, how we could react and maybe, you know, what was the best way forward after that.
David Keyes:Makes a lot of sense. And so at that time, you said you were not working in R at that point.
Cedric Viddone:No.
David Keyes:So I'm curious kind of how how R fits into this. How when did you get into R? What led you to do that? What has that changed in terms of the work that you do?
Cedric Viddone:I think I got into R fairly recently. I think my first interaction with r was probably in 2020, not before that. So, yeah, it's kind of new for me, and it's actually colleagues. So within UNHCR, you mentioned Amadou, that has been part of this podcast before that I'm working, constantly with, and there was other people like Edouard Le Goupil that was also kind of a pioneer in the in the unit here community. And, I think, we started, like, a super small team that were actually doing art, not actually even team.
Cedric Viddone:It was more like people scattered around the globe trying to find ways to be a bit more efficient, a bit less manual, try to do, you know, more work that can be a bit automatized and not just on the copying pasting. And that's basically where I started. They kind of, like, dragged me into that. And maybe the other component that kind of, like, sold me, the our thing was all the incredible v's, like, you could find in tidy Tuesday of this kind of challenges where you see people making incredible visuals straight out of r and also people that you had in that podcast before. So it's like, wow.
Cedric Viddone:You you can actually make that just with code. And for me, it was kind of like a a game changer. I think I started fairly slowly by just using it for ggplot. I was not even cleaning and wrangling my data. I was in in r.
Cedric Viddone:I was still doing it in Excel and just, you know, plugging my data, doing my plot, and, oh, okay. I can make that. That's fine, and now I can replicate it easily and stuff like this. And strangely enough, I think I started maybe after 2 months, I was actually playing with R. I started building a package as the request of my colleague.
Cedric Viddone:The package itself was not really about R. It was more about CSS, HTML, and this kind of thing. So it was for a report template. So it was more this kind of thing. So it was in page it's page down.
Cedric Viddone:So, basically, most of it is CSS. So it's not really r. So that's a bit r. I got dragged into that, and, yeah, it took me quite some time to start doing data wrangling and everything in r. But, Yeah.
Cedric Viddone:I think, no, I'm I'm definitely using it daily, probably not to make all only these and stuff like this, but, just to wrangle my data. Instead of opening it in Excel, I will start doing it here, analyzing it quickly, making quickly a plot if I need all these kind of things. And and I it's changes a lot of things. And from what we've probably seen in the future in this discussion, I think it's also the repetition of the task. I mean, often we have to do the same product over and over, or we have to update it.
Cedric Viddone:The data changes, and we are in a really, I would say, fluid world where emergencies happens every day and, you know, you get data in the morning and the data in the afternoon would be different. So if you do everything manually, basically, you start over the process again and again. So that's, for me, probably the game changer. And, I mean, I don't think we are there yet, but I think it's what we are trying to build now. And, also, it's fairly new r for our community even of data people that have been working in Excel or in databases for years.
Cedric Viddone:They're not all familiar with r, but it's growing. It's growing. I think when I first started to build this package, we were, I don't know, maybe a couple of dozen playing with our in in UNHR. And now we have kind of a community where we have a chat. We are sharing experience, tips and tricks, and it's more than a 150 people now.
Cedric Viddone:So, you know, it's it's growing and I think people are getting interested and, yeah, there are definitely ways of doing our job, I think, more efficiently and in a more reproducible way. And also I would say we are more accountable. We can show how we did it. We can, you know, people can replicate it and can access the data, can do their own analysis, and just see that with open eyes and not something that is hidden somewhere in the next cells of a of a person. And so I think that's where we are heading.
Cedric Viddone:Not sure we are there yet, but then I think that's what we are trying
David Keyes:to do. I'm I'm amazed. I didn't realize there were a 150 people using r at UNHCR. That's a quite a sizable number. I'm curious.
David Keyes:Can you give me some examples of what are the the kind of jobs that those folks have, and what are they typically doing with R?
Cedric Viddone:I think this is also due to the fact that we have more and more statistician within the organization. Madhu is one of them, and we kind of, like, went through a process of regionalization a few years back. So people that were based at HQ are now sitting with the different region around the world. So it kind of, like, increased the number of people that have this statistic background. I think we also now starting to do more and more data science work with modeling and all of these things that before we were not really doing.
Cedric Viddone:Data has became really central to UNHCR a few years back. UNHCR trying to be the reference in terms of data when we talk about displacement and forced displacement and people moving around countries and crossing borders. And so I think the importance of data in senior management and even really high in the organization really changed a few year back. And the all the data that we actually collect and have every day, it's a lot. And now we are doing something with it.
Cedric Viddone:And I think this created definitely profiles that we didn't really have before that are not part of the organization and also why they increase their interest for R really increased, and people are using it more and more. Or people like me that were they're doing visualization work and dealing with Excel to make my views and stuff, and, I'm just doing it only in r, and I don't have to switch back and forth. And if the data changes tonight, I can just rerun the thing, and I have it.
David Keyes:So I wonder if you could give me an example just to make it really concrete, like an example of a project that you have worked on or seen someone work on recently using R at UNHCR?
Cedric Viddone:Well, I don't have project that I'm using R from the beginning to the end Because I think we also have this variety of profiles, some people that are doing also data related job that have no experience in R. And we are still in this world where Excel is definitely the king. We have GIS software that has been around for years and we also have now Power BI. People are really fond of Power BI and the dashboard and everything. And it's also the tools that the organization provides are, it's something a bit different.
Cedric Viddone:You have to be interested, you have to download it and use it. But, I think what do we do a lot in the humanitarian sector for emergencies? We are making a lot of 1 pager PDF that is basically kind of like a summary of the situation. So basically you have a couple of key figures that let's say, oh, you have a 2,100,000 people displaced and blah blah blah. And this kind of thing, and then you have a couple of graph that will show probably the evolution of displacement or the type of people or the type of needs that they might have.
Cedric Viddone:And then you have a map. Where are those people? What do they need? Do do do we need shelter for them? And all of these things, they are kind of like summarized in a nice and beautiful way on a piece of paper.
Cedric Viddone:And I would love to be able to just do all of it.
David Keyes:Yeah.
Cedric Viddone:Basically from the collection of the data, from cleaning it, from making my visual and stuff. That will be the case. But in a day to day, I would say we're doing a lot of data stories with my team. So we are a very small team that basically we are more a support team. So we offer support to other within UNHCR, either for just making simple chart or making reports or making more important stories.
Cedric Viddone:And we do more advanced data stories that are maybe you have time to show afterwards, but that are a lot of it's an actual story like you can see in the pudding or, you know, this kind of of media where you have a narrative, you have pictures, you have visuals and stuff. And basically, make all the visuals and the data wrangling that is tied to those visual in R. And then even on the main UNHCR dot r website, we have a few visuals that have been or maps that have been actually created from a to z in R. All of it. The other things I've seen, if you could have seen it maybe with Amadou, it's all those those presentation of statistics.
Cedric Viddone:So they call the data directly from API in R and make this presentation, and then they can then present to senior management or to donors the statistics that are up to date, branded straight out of R because we have made some packages like this. And we also have, like, a lot of reporting templates. I'm not really in the report business in terms of day to day job, but I think that's why I built those packages because people could just with just adding a template to their product, having a beautiful UNHCR branded product that they don't have to think about, just to think about the content and don't care about the leak and feed.
David Keyes:That makes sense. And, yeah, I'm looking forward to chatting in a few minutes with you about both a package you have made that has a ggplot theme for UNHCR, and then also a quarto template that you've made to kind of help people who wanna, you know, take those plots that they make as well as text and whatever else, maps maybe, and add them to a nice template. Hi. David here. Did you know that r for the rest of us does consulting work?
David Keyes:We help organizations to communicate more effectively and efficiently with beautiful parameterized reports, interactive websites, and custom R packages. Learn more about how we can help your organization at rfortherestofus.com/consulting. So I guess I'm just curious. Why is UNHCR so invest so much in data visualization and kind of making things look good? I I it seems I mean, tell me if you think this is wrong, but it seems unique in that there are a lot of organizations that don't invest quite as much effort and and capital into this.
David Keyes:So do you think it's accurate that UNHCR really cares about that type of thing? And if so, why?
Cedric Viddone:I'm not sure it's unique in the humanitarian sector. Another agency, UNOCHA, like a office for coordination for humanitarian affairs, probably the kind of, like, a pioneer in this approach of having really polished visual product that are easily understandable and that you can share with a wide variety of stakeholders, being donors, being non data people, senior management, but they can still get a sense of the situation. And I think that's something where the the saw the importance of their brand early on in the process. UNHCR has built a really strong brand. I think we started in 2015, like, building a really strong, bold brand that is recognizable and that people can identify to.
Cedric Viddone:And I think that brand followed by the data and the importance of the the the the data for Unit Share made it that we needed nice, beautiful, polished, and with a really strong standard data visualization. So I think that's where a bit Yeah. It's build out and and why why we're here now. And, yeah, probably Unitiar is is well placed in this organizing all of this standards and everything. But I think we are not the only one.
Cedric Viddone:Yeah. At least in the humanitarian sector. And I think it's also due to the composition of the organization. So I think we are 18,000 people working for unit share scattered all across the globe in some really remote areas, you know, where you are barely Internet. So if you want to feel as 1, you definitely need strong standard and brand and guidelines that you can follow and and that are easy to use also because being that big and that scattered around the world, you definitely have a wide variety of profile and technical skills and everything.
Cedric Viddone:So it has to be user centered to more than anything else.
David Keyes:So one way that you've, kind of implemented enabling people to use the UNHCR branding is through making a package called UNHCR themes. We'll post the link in the show notes so people can check it out. Before we have you actually show the the code and and show how the package works, I'm curious what led you to develop it in the first place.
Cedric Viddone:Well, I think the first one they asked from Amadou and others. So, basically, if I could, I could make it. I think at the time, we developed the first iteration. Our user within the organization were not that high, but a few years back, we developed a database guideline that was the first of its kind for UNHCR. That was kind of like following the brand.
Cedric Viddone:And the idea of this database guideline was to be technologically agnostic, meaning that you could apply those recommendation through different system, being Excel, being illustrator, being whatever you were using, you could just apply overall recommendation. So based on that, it was super easy to just say, ah, let's make a ggplot theme that just embrace those recommendations so people can simply, by adding a couple of lines in their code, starting from a default ggplot chart to something that is UNHCR branded that people can recognize with the colors, with the fonts, to the organization of the headers, of the title, subtitle, and everything. So I think that was basically the idea. Just, again, try to cover as much possible ground we could with those standards so it makes any user, able to make UNHCR branded charts. Again, with this database guideline, we created tons of templates and tools even in PowerPoint, even in Excel.
Cedric Viddone:I mean, everything we could. I have a colleague that is really strong in in d 3 and Python. So we also have Python templates and, d 3 templates to make visualization that are unit chart. It's basically a bit of luck, meaning like I have the willingness to learn R and I had the design background, so we're like, oh, let's, let's try this. And it was a good introduction to R for me.
Cedric Viddone:And I really like it. And yeah. And maybe they were freak of, like, content and stuff. And so it was, you know, just expanding that a bit. So, yeah, that's that's how it started.
Cedric Viddone:I think everything we do in terms of guideline and templates and tools is just trying to support colleagues out there and just make their life easier. So, basically, if it's just adding a line to their R code to get a nicely polished unit share plot, we can just spend a couple of days or weeks trying to build a package that will fit their needs. And and this package with the community really matured, and it's now in CRAN and everything. So it became something that is now really within the organization, people know that package and are using it and making plots with it. So yeah.
David Keyes:Hey. David here. Just wanted to let you know that at this point in the conversation, we switched to a screen cast. Now obviously, showing code doesn't work very well in an audio podcast, so if you wanna see the rest of this conversation, check out the video version of this podcast on YouTube. You can find a link to that in the show notes.
David Keyes:Well, awesome. This has been really interesting to see, you know, the development of both the theme as well as the the Cuarto extension. I think it's great to see how you can use various tools within the kind of our sphere to keep everything on brand. If people wanna Yep. Learn more about this or learn more about the work you do at UNHCR, we'll obviously post some links.
David Keyes:Are there particular places you would point people to?
Cedric Viddone:Well, I think for everything related to what we did today, it's definitely the database platform is the go to place where you can also find all the different links to our different r tool that we've made, the templates, the packages, and everything like this. And we also showcase other type of packages, like, the more data centered packages that Amadu talked about the previous time. You know, all the statistic data that we have that are that is packaged into some R package. And, Yeah. I wish that in the future, we can go even further and really, you know, work on more.
Cedric Viddone:I would definitely would like to pick up your brain maybe another time to, you know, see how you work on parameterized reporting and stuff like that and and layout. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to play a bit with tips, but I think it's something I created a quarter extension for page g I
David Keyes:Yeah.
Cedric Viddone:Also. But, because at the beginning, I thought it was the direction that posit was taking, but it seems that it's not gonna be the case. So probably tips will be the way to go, but I haven't had time to really play with this. But, I think we could create really nice Yeah. Yeah.
Cedric Viddone:That's right. People can use. Because, yeah, peep people love PDF in our Yes. Type of organization. PDF is still what people want.
Cedric Viddone:They want to be able to print it, go to a meeting with it, show it, and so that's the
David Keyes:Yeah. Definitely. Well, I'll post a link to that as well if people wanna see kind of how you've been playing around with making PDFs using the Page JS JavaScript library. So great. Well, Cedric, thank you so much for joining us.
David Keyes:I really appreciate it.
Cedric Viddone:Thank you for having me, and it was a pleasure to be here.
David Keyes:That's it for today's episode. I hope you learned something new about how you can use R. Do you know anyone else who might be interested in this episode? Please share it with them. If you're interested in learning r, check out r for the rest of us.
David Keyes:We've got courses to help you no matter whether you're just starting out with r or you've got years of experience. Do you work for an organization that needs help communicating effectively with data? Check out our consulting services at r for the rest of us dot com slash consulting. We work with clients to make high quality data visualization, beautiful reports made entirely with R, interactive maps, and much, much more. And before we go, one last request.
David Keyes:Do you know anyone who's using R in a unique and creative way? We're always looking for new guests for the R For the Rest of Us podcast. If you know someone who would be a good guest, please email me at david@rfortherestofus dotcom. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.