Data Stories

We have Dietmar Offenhuber, Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, on the show again to talk about “Indexical Visualizations”: visualizations that reduce the gap between the recorded phenomenon and its representation. On the show we talk about strategies to define and build indexical visualizations. Dietmar provides numerous examples, including thermometers, tree rings, petri dishes, and the blinking lights in your router. He also offers tips on experimenting with this kind of visualization and connecting to the indexical vis community.

We talk with Isabel Meirelles, Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto, about her book "Design for Information" and Information Plus, the data visualization conference she organized in June.

This week Mimi Onuoha joins Moritz on the show for a project episode from the Eyeo Festival. Mimi is a Brooklyn-based artist and researcher, and currently a Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute. Mimi is fascinated by the moment when data get collected -- by what can be captured in that moment, and what goes unseen. As a Fulbright-National Geographic Fellow, Mimi developed Pathways, a data storytelling project on a month's worth of mobile data from a small group of Londoners. Using a quasi-ethnographic approach, the project reflects not only the individuals' mobile metadata, but also their experiences becoming data subjects. On the show, we discuss Mimi's process recruiting both friends and strangers to become her data subjects, her experience developing personal relationships with each of them, and their reaction to the final product. LINKS Fulbright-National Geographic Fellowship Data and Society Research Institute Open Paths app Moves app owned by Facebook Reveal.js slideshow software

We have Matt Daniels on the show, the "journalist engineer" behind Polygraph, a blog featuring beautiful journalistic pieces based on data. If you are not familiar with the site, stop now and take a look. Matt starts with a simple question -- for example, what songs from the '90s are still popular? -- and tries to answer it through data analysis and visualization. The result is always a well-crafted web page and applications, with a mix of data analysis, interactive graphics, and explanations. On the show we talk specifically about two projects: "The most timeless songs of all-time," in which Matt analyzes song popularity from Spotify data, and "Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age," in which he examines movie dialogues as a way to dig deeper into gender biases in the film industry. LINKS Matt Daniels Matt’s Medium article “The Journalist Engineer” Project: "The largest vocabulary in Hip Hop" Project: "How music taste evolved" Project: "The most timeless songs of all-time" Project: "Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age"

We talk with the data visualization team from Bocoup about how they work with groups to create open-source data visualization software. We also discuss the OpenVis Conference that they organize each year.

Astrophysicist Scott Hughes from MIT plays the sounds of colliding black holes and explains what they mean.

Eleanor is Etsy’s new Security Architect and "a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian." We talk with Eleanor about how to deal with data ethics and privacy.

Kim is a visualization researcher and information designer. He currently works at the Center for Complex Network Research, the lab led by famous network physicist László Barabási. Kim works in a team of scientists to create effective and beautiful visualizations that explain complex scientific phenomena. In the show we focus on Untangling Tennis, a data visualization project aimed at explaining the relationship between popularity and athletic performance. We also talk about his more recent project, the Cosmic Web, which visualizes 24,000 galaxies and their network of gravitational relationships. Enjoy the show! This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Make sure to check out the blog post listing Visualization Advocate Patrik Lundblad’s favorite data visualization pioneers. You can try out Qlik Sense for free at qlik.de/datastories. LINKS Kim Albrecht: http://kimalbrecht.com/ Untangling Tennis: http://untangling-tennis.net/ The Cosmic Web: http://cosmicweb.barabasilab.com/ D3.js: https://d3js.org/ three.js, a javascript library for 3D vis: http://threejs.org/ Ben Shneiderman’s The New ABC of Research: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/newabcs/ Peter Galison's Image and Logic: http://www.amazon.com/Image-Logic-Material-Culture-Microphysics/dp/0226279170 Peter Galison’s “Images Scatter Into Data, Data Gathers Into Images”: http://www.ann-sophielehmann.nl/content/docs/grgalison.pdf

Jeff Heer is Associate Professor at the University of Washington, co-creator D3.js and co-funder of Trifacta. We talk about software infrastructure, Trifacta, and the interplay between research and industry.

This is a special edition from Tapestry, the conference on Data Storytelling that gathers visualization experts, journalists, designers, NGOs, academics, etc. Enrico sits together with Robert Kosara to talk about the conference, the keynotes, some of the short stories talk, and how to participate to future editions of Tapestry.

We talk with Rachel Binx about developing data visualization software for NASA.

We talk about data visualization literacy with Jeremy Boy, vis designer and postdoc at NYU, Helen Kennedy, Professor of Digital Society, and Andy Kirk, vis educator and editor of visualisingdata.com.

We talk with Assistant Professor Miriah Meyer and PhD candidate Nina McCurdy about Poemage, a data visualization tool they developed to analyze the sonic topology of poems.

Hadley created a number of hugely popular libraries for the R language, including ggplot2, which is used throughout the world to analyze and present data with R. On the show we talk about how he created ggplot2 and how it became so popular, some of the other libraries he built and the R ecosystem, as well as strategies to create popular software for data analysis and visualization. Enjoy Hadley Wickham!

We talk with Ben Wellington about his blog I Quant NY, where he writes about surprising facts he finds analyzing NYC open data.