Data Stories

Hi Folks! Dietmar Offenhuber We have another great guest on the show. Dietmar Offenhuber visits us to talk about smart cities and visualizing data coming from cities. Dietmar has an interesting background. He has a background in architecture with a Dipl. Ing. from the Technical University Vienna and then he got a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab and a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT. He's also been a key researcher at Ars Electronica Futurelab. Now he is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Art + Design and Public Policy, where he does research on the technological and social aspects of smart cities and urban governance. In the show we talk about many of his super interesting projects such as Wegzeit (timespace visualizations of LA) and Trash Track (on tracking and visualizing where garbage goes), and interesting concepts such as Accountability Technologies and Infrastructure Legibility. We also talk about the future of smart cities and what we should expect to get our of smart cities. Enjoy the show! LINKS (Moritz Launched ON BROADWAY with Lev Manovich, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer) Our Guest: Dietmar Offenhuber Arts Electronica Future Lab MIT Senseable City Lab Northeastern University Department of Art + Design Wegzeit - timespace visualizations of LA Comment Flow (social media visualization) Semaspace (graph editing tool) Trash Track (tracking and visualizing trash) Smartcitizen (distributed crowdsourced sensors) Bill Mitchell (MIT Media Lab Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences) Mapping the archive (project with Dietmar and Moritz on the Arts Electronica Archive) Dietmar's Interview: Sorting Out Cities Deitmar's Book: Inscribing A Square (how urban data shapes public space / discourse, and what kinds of representations are involved, and what is their function) Dietmar's Book: Accountability Technologies – Tools for Asking Hard Questions Dietmar's Book: Decoding The City

Ah! We made it to 50 episodes and three years of this lovely podcast of ours. We have loved every bit of it, every guest, every single discussion and all the support we received from everyone. For this episode we asked repeatedly to submit a short audio snippet or text and we received a few amazing ones. We are very grateful to you all guys, this is amazing. In the episode we talk about a few statistics we extracted on episodes with highest number of listeners and blog posts with highest number of visits. We then read the text messages we received. And finally we have inserted the audio messages we received. THANKS A LOT! This is amazing. P.S. Special thanks to Erik Jacobson for his amazing collage! :) LINKS Most popular episodes (of about the last 12 months) Data Stories #39: DensityDesign w/ Paolo Ciuccarelli Data Stories #38: Visual Complexity w/ Manuel Lima Data Stories #40: Narrative Visualization Research w/ Jessica Hullman Data Stories #44: w/ Tamara Munzner Most popular pages: Data Stories #5 – How To Learn Data Visualization (with Andy Kirk) Data Stories #22: NYT Graphics and D3 with Mike Bostock and Shan Carter Data Stories #35: Visual Storytelling w/ Alberto Cairo and Robert Kosara Podcast recommendations: Talking Machines (on Machine Learning) Theory Of Everything Song Exploder Reply All    

Hi everyone, In this episode we have Scott Klein from ProPublica with us. ProPublica is a nonprofit organization that does investigative journalism and Scott directs a team of data journalists and programmers to create new applications based on data and data visualization. In the show we talk about how ProPublica works and what challenges they are confronted with. How do you pick a story? How do you develop it? How do you make sure you are not making mistakes? This are some of the questions we discuss. We also talk about tools and libraries and how to train yourself to become a data journalist. This was a very much needed episode as we never had a proper episode on data journalism. Thanks Scott for coming on the show! --- LINKS ProPublica's Dollars for Docs Book: How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg PDF Scraping Tool: Tabula (http://tabula.technology/) The IPython Notebook (web-based interactive computational environment) ProPublica's Open Source Tools The New School's Program Journalism + Design The ProPublica Nerd Blog Knight-Mozilla Open News (community of data journalists) NICAR-L Mailing List (National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting)

Great episode here folks! We have Stamen's CEO Eric Rodenbeck on the show to talk about "Visualization Going Mainstream". Moritz took inspiration from Eric's Eyeo talk "And Then There Were Twelve – How to (keep) running a successful data visualization and design studio." and decided he must come on the show. Stamen is a design studio in San Francisco founded in 2001 by Eric. They have been real pioneers in data visualization and cartographic mapping with the production of great apps and libraries such as Pretty Maps, Trulia Hindsight, Crimespotting and many many more. (See also our episode with Mike Migurski) With Eric we discuss a broad range of important topics including: how to manage a vis business, how to have an impact with visualization and visualization success stories. Enjoy the show! LINKS Eric’s talk at Eyeo Stamen’s Digg Labs visualization Founder of Digg Kevin Rose First word art / last word art Book: Maps and Legends Out of Sight, Out of Mind - Pitch Interactive’s Drones Visualization James Bridle’s Dronestagram Stamen’s Crimespotting Project (mapping crime in San Francisco and Oakland) maptime.io: open learning environment to learn how to make maps The Atlantic’s Article on: Why I Am Not A Maker Stamen’s Work with San Francisco Museum Of Art

Data visualization researcher Enrico Bertini and Truth & Beauty Operator Moritz Stefaner discuss their views on data visualization, infographics, information aesthetics and related themes. http://datastori.es http://twitter.com/datastories

We have two classic guests for a classic episode: a year review with Robert Kosara and Andy Kirk. We talk about what happened in visualization in 2014 and what may happen in 2015. We start the show saying that nothing really special happened, but then you'll see we cover a lot of ground and end up eventually deciding that a lot did happen!

Happy new year, everyone! We start 2015 with a bang, and have Nicholas Felton on the show. We talk about his personal annual reports, typography, privacy, and how we all deal with data and tracking today. Great conversation. One more link we only found later: Practical Typography is a great starting point for anyone who would like to learn more about typography and type. Thanks again to Tableau Software for sponsoring the show! Check out the free trial they have, it's a great piece of software. And, in other news: We are looking for support with the audio editing! So, if you have some experience with audio editing podcasts, and could also imagine to help us with collection the links and titling the chapters etc, this would be great. We can offer a small compensation, too. And, of course, you're among the very first people worldwide to listen to the new Data Stories recordings :) Next week, we will record a 2014 review with a few of the usual suspects. What moved you this year? Leave us a comment or tweet us!

We have Prof. Tamara Munzner from University of British Columbia with us in this episode. Tamara is one of the most prominent figures in visualization research. She has done tons of interesting work starting from the nineties (look into her publications page) including the famous "Nested Model of Visualization Design" and her numerous design studies work, like the excellent "Overview," a tool for journalistic investigative analysis. We also talk about her new book "Visualization Analysis and Design." Finally a textbook teaching how to create visualization tools for analysis purposes!

It took us a while, but — here we go! A three part episode from IEEE VIS 2014. Thanks again to Robert Kosara for coming on our show again to talk shop, and look back on a week full of really interesting scientific findings about data visualization.

Hi all, we have the great Santiago Ortiz with us again in this episode. Santiago builds interactive data visualizations to "get deep insight from data, solve real problems and answer strategic questions." If you are an avid DS follower you may recall that we had him on the show in episode 19. In this episode he comes back to talk with us about visualization and data science, how he strives to create value out of his data visualization projects and how he is *not* interested data visualization! Enjoy the show!

Hi Folks! In this episode we have Lisa Strausfeld from Bloomberg with us. Lisa started doing VIS very early on. In the episode she tells us about her super interesting story of how she got into VIS and all the jobs she has had: starting as a student of Art and Computer Science (yes, Art and CS!), designing chips for Motorola, and now these days working at Bloomberg Visual Data and Bloomberg View.

We have a very researchy kind of episode this time. Jessica Hullman is on the show to talk about her research on narrative visualization. Jessica is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley and soon to be Assistant Professor at University of Washington iSchool. In the show we talk about lots of interesting basic visualization research issues like visualization literacy, bias and saliency, uncertainty, and some interesting automated annotation systems that Jessica has developed. We also talk about Jessica's background in experimental poetry!

Hi there! We have been chasing Paolo for a while and eventually we managed to have him on the show. Paolo is Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano and he is the founder of Density Design, a lab with an interesting mix of research, design and visualization. With Paolo we talk about all things at the intersection of design and visualization, including a very interesting digression on architecture and how it helped him in the development of the lab. We also talk about how to teach design and the role of Visualization in the Humanities. We also talk about Raw, an online visualization tool they developed which has recently gained quite some popularity (if you don't know it you should try it). Enjoy the show! --- Links Cyber-Geography Maps (early inspiration) Density Design Flicker Stream Density Design Blog 99 Models of Design Processes Mapping the Republic of Letters (and this: http://athanasius.stanford.edu/) Franco Moretti's Distant Readings and Giorgio Caviglia (and the “incorporation” of design into humanities) Fineo (Sankey Diagrams Tool)

Hi all, Finally, after chasing him for a long while we have Manuel Lima on the show! Manuel has been around for a very long time. He created Visual Complexity in 2005, an archive of network visualizations which became very popular. He is also the author of two great books: Visual Complexity and The Book of Trees. In the show we talk about archiving visualizations, how to write and publish visualization books and how the whole field had developed and where it is heading. Great great show! Take care. Links Manuel’s master thesis at Parson’s: BlogViz Visual Complexity (Book) Visual Complexity (Website) The Book of Trees Information Visualization Manifesto (check the comments section!) Manuel’s Current Employer: Code Academy Infosthetics Blog Barabasi’s Linked: http://barabasilab.com/LinkedBook/ Johnson’s Emergence Visual Simplexity (Book) The Allosphere Display

That's a particularly tough but juicy episode folks! We turn a little bit inward and talk about the many challenges of teaching visualization. We have code artist Scott Murray on the show, the author of the lovely D3 book "Interactive Data Visualization for the Web" and our almost-cohost ever-present Andy Kirk with us from visualisingdata.com. Scott teaches visualization courses at Department of Art and Architecture University of San Francisco and Andy teaches some very popular 1-day workshop courses all around the world. We talk about our experience with teaching visualization, reporting about what seems to work and what does not. I think we mostly report about our constant struggle to make things work :) Hopefully this is going to be of help and fun for you guys! And once again, thanks to our audio editor Nathan Griffiths (twitter.com/njgriffiths) for taking care of this episode! Links Santiago Ortiz's: 45 ways to communicate two quantities John Swabisch's HelpMeViz (to teach by good/bad examples) Scott's Easy as Pi