Humans of Kontinentalist: Bianchi Dy

A researcher in data visualization, artist, and programmer, Bianchi has been helping us bring to life countless stories with her manifold talents! An incessantly curious person, we pick her brain about all sorts of interesting things. Check out our chat with her and her portfolio.

What have you been doing at Konti?

I’m a dataviz designer at Kontinentalist. I also help the writers with their data analysis and data collection — my role is a bit special because rarely do the developers get to be involved in the data analysis from the very beginning. And I also have [academic] data visualization research background, so I suggest data visualizations to raise points that might not have been raised.

Sometimes I help with finding sources (or processing data, like taste profiles for the chilli story). I also help with the cleaning and checking — for Zafirah’s heat inequality story, she was asking me like, why am I not getting the right numbers? And then I realised some of the math had been done wrong. So sometimes I step in to help to be another set of eyes for a piece.

Why did you join Kontinentalist in the first place?

I found out about Konti through Ate Poorthuis, who was my boss. I was helping to TA his dataviz class, and he was showing examples of dataviz that were interesting and innovative — one of them was Konti’s queuing story. Aishah was in that class that year, before she went to Kontinentalist as a front-end developer. At that time, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get renewed at my research role, so I applied, starting from a per-project basis. But the people were good to work with, and I was excited to keep working on visualization projects that have a social cause behind them. So I stuck around.