Data Stories

Hey yo ... super cool guest today on Data Stories. We have data artist Jer Thorp for a whole episode on Data Art and Visualization. We managed to catch him before he leaves for a deep dive in a submarine next week. Jer is former artist in residence at New York Times R&D Labs and now he is the co-founder of the Office For Creative Research, a studio/lab that mixes science and art. Among many other things he is the creator of the algorithm and software tool "to aid in the placement of the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan" and Cascade, a tool to visualize "the sharing activity of New York Times content over social networks." In this episode we talk about his past and new projects, teaching art and vis and the many intersections between art and science. Links - The IEEE VIS'14 Art Program (that's going to be in Paris) - NYU ITP Data Art Course - Cascade (vis of NYT sharing activity) - Shakespeare Machine (earstudio | video on vimeo) - Jer's HBR article on "Visualization as Process, Not Output" - Collection of vis development process images from OCR - Example of Data Performance: Thousands of Exhausted Things (OCResearch and The Elevator Repair Service) - Hans Rosling's TED Talk "The Best Stats You've Ever Seen" - Eyeo Festival

Hi all, Hot topic today! We invited Alberto Cairo and Robert Kosara to discuss the role of storytelling in visualization. What is storytelling? Is all visualization storytelling? Should we always strive for telling a story? How does storytelling match with exploratory visualization? Should we aim more for worlds and macroscopes than stories as Moritz advocated a while back at Visualized? We went on a somewhat lengthy discussion on these topics and I think we all ended up agreeing on a lot of things and developed a much more nuanced view of storytelling. As you can see from the picture we had lots of fun (thanks Robert for taking the screenshot). Fantastic chat! Note: Alberto has a lot more to say after the episode so he decided to publish a linked post that clarifies some of the things he said on the show. You find the post here: ... P.S. Big, big thanks to Fabricio Tavares for taking care of the audio editing of this episode! --- Links Lynn Chen on Implied Stories (and Data Vis) Periscopic's Dino Citraro on A Framework for Talking About Data Narration Book cited by Alberto: The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Great visualizations without stories (proposed by Moritz): Aron Koblin's Flight Patterns Martin Wattenberg's Map of the Market Moritz position on stories: Look ma, no story! | Worlds, not stories Enrico's position on stories: Telling a story doesn’t tell the whole story Robert series on storytelling: Stories Are Gateways Into Worlds | Story: A Definition Robert's mention of visualization on Copenhagen: Emissions, Treaties and Impacts Jessica Hallman's VIS'13 paper on: Deeper Understanding of Sequence in Visualization

[Thanks to our audio editor Nathan Griffiths (https://twitter.com/njgriffiths) for taking care of this episode] Hi everyone! After a long while ... we have a real British voice on the show again! In this episode we have the pleasure to host data journalist Simon Rogers. Simon has been leading data journalism initiatives at The Guardian for many years and he recently moved to Twitter (with the official role of Data Editor) where he takes care of creating visual stories out of Twitter data. In the show we talk about his past experience at The Guardian as well as the more recent and exciting developments at Twitter. Links The debate of Gregor & Moritz with Simon on colors (and Simon pissed off by it :)) Creative tools: CartoDB and DataWrapper? Twitter Data Blog (where new projects are announced) Overview page of Twitter visualizations Simon's post: Data Journalism as Punk [very interesting concept!] Simon's infographics kid books: Animal Kingdom and Human Body

Hi Everyone! We have Jon Schwabish on the show in this episode. Jon is an economist who specializes in data visualization for politics and economics. You can see some of his work in the blog he writes called Policyviz. We invited him to talk about his recent new initiative called HelpMeViz, a web site where people can send requests to visualize some data of interest or redesign some particularly tricky charts. The web site quickly gained some momentum and already publishes quite a nice set of charts, suggested redesigns, and most of all very insightful discussions (it's not just the usual I like this, I like that). There is a lot to learn there. In the interview we talk about how HelpMeViz was born, how it works, what kind of entries they have been published so far and how it's going to evolve. Give a look to HelpMeViz and submit your own charts and data there! Links How HelpMeViz works ... Jon's "An Economist's Guide to Visualizing Data" (full of very nice examples of chart redesign) Interesting discussions from HelpMeViz: Budget Pie Chart Triplet State Migration Flows Debate About Colors --- And here's another piece of great news: For the first time, this episode was audio edited and annotated by a volunteer helper - woo! Fabricio Tavares was kind to help us. Thanks a million! The equation is simple: less audio editing work for Moritz means more episodes we can do in a year. Get in touch in case you would like help us, too!

We have Giorgia Lupi from Accurat on the show with us this time in our first real face-to-face episode ever -- yes Moritz and Enrico in the same room! Giorgia's work, and generally the work done by her agency, has been super popular lately. You might have seen, for instance, their work visualizing Nobel Prizes or visualizing painters' lives. Giorgia kindly hosted us in the Accurat's studio in New York where we had a nice chat on hand-crafted visualization, high-density designs, design studios, and much much more.

Happy 2014! Here we go folks. Another year has passed. We review what was big and major trends in 2013 and what to expect in 2014. We have two old DS friends on the show to help us with the review: Andy "Visualisingdata" Kirk and Robert "Eagereyes" Kosara. Important announcement: in 2014 we want to hear more from you! Please feel free to contact us to ask questions, we will address them in our upcoming podcasts. You can also suggest new guests or topics you would like us to cover. You can reach us through: Twitter (@datastories) | Facebook | Email: mail@datastori.es. We are looking forward to hearing from you! Take care. --- Links Periscopic's U.S. Gun Deaths Pitch Interactive's Drones NYT's Silkroad and Snawfall Wealth Inequality Video Interactive Things' NZZ Swiss Maps Sketchy Rendering for InfoVis Age of Buildings (pointillistic cartography) Nanocubes: Fast Visualization of Large Spatiotemporal Datasets Washington Post's Shots heard around the District Density Design's Raw Visualization Tool New Blogs: http://wtfviz.net/ | http://helpmeviz.com/ | http://thumbsupviz.com/ Book: Design for Information (Robert's Review) Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight and the Vis Job Opening Tableau Story Points Infoactive - Kickstarter Vis Tool Project

We have Marian Dörk on the show today to talk about the "Information Flaneur": an approach to data visualization centered on navigating, exploring, browsing and observing data with curiosity to learn about what's there, and to see and be surprised by new thoughts and discoveries. Marian is Research Professor at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam near Berlin where he works on "exploring novel uses of interactive visualizations to support a wide range of information practices." We talk about many interesting new directions for visualization like visualizing data starting from a few seed points, whether we always need an overview first in visualization, and tips on how to design visualization for "information flaneurs."

We have a super guest this time on the show! Ben Shneiderman joins us to talk about his new treemap art project (beautiful treemap prints you can hang on the wall), treemaps and their history, and information visualization in general. Needless to say, we had a wonderful time chatting with him: lots of history and very inspiring thoughts (tip: we should look at vis 50-100 years from now!)

Hi Folks! We did it again: we have a special episode directly from IEEE VIS'13 (the premier academic conference on visualization). Enrico caught Robert Kosara and recorded almost one hour of highlights from the conference. And there is a final message for Moritz too! Don't miss it. Take care. -- Links (some of the papers mentioned): Chart Memorability Sketchy Story (freeform data visualization) Understanding Sequence in Narrative Visualization Nanocubes (large-scale visualization on the web) Visual Sedimentation (handling dynamic/streaming data) Robert's Conference Report on Eagereyes IEEE (VisWeek) VIS Papers on the Web (collection of papers accessible on the web)

Here we go with another great episode. This time more on the data side. We have Kate Crawford, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, on the show talking about the other face of big data. That is, after all the excitement, hype, and buzz, she is the one who is asking the tough questions: Is more data always better? Is there any objective truth in it? Is big data really making us smarter?

We are back after a relaxing summer with a brand new episode! We have Petra Isenberg, from the Aviz team at INRIA (we've had other guests from the same lab in the past) to talk about visualization on non-standard devices and environments. Yes, stuff like display walls, surfaces, tabletops, and people collaborating around them. It feels like the future is here and there's a ton of potentially interesting applications for visualization! Petra gives us hints about what works and what does not work, what the research says, what has been tried already, and what needs to be explored, etc. She also gives practical recommendations at the end about how to start doing visualization on these devices. Really cool stuff!

In this episode we talk about visualization on mobile and touch devices. How do you design visualization interfaces for these kinds of devices? How different is it to interact with your fingertips rather than with your mouse? Advantages, disadvantages, unexplored opportunities? We discuss with Dominukus Baur, interaction designer and mobile data visualization specialist.

In this episode we talk about the VAST Challenge, a visual analytics contest organized every year. The VAST Challenge is co-located with the IEEE VIS Conference, the premier venue for academic work in visualization. The VAST Challenge has many unique features (like the generation of synthetic data sets with injected ground truth) and this year for the first time it features a predictive analytics and design mini-challenge. We talk with Prof. Georges Grinstein from UMass Lowell and Celste Paul from NSA. They give us lots of details about how the data is generated, how the entries are evaluated and how it looks like participating to the contest. You guys should actually give it a try and rock it!

In this episode we touch upon a tricky question: where is the fine line between taking inspiration from other projects and merely copying them? We discuss with Bryan Connor from The Why Axis and Mahir Yavuz from Seed Scientific. Note: We suggest you give a look to the links on our website before listening to the podcast. Most of the episode is centered around these examples, which we selected for discussion.

We have graphic editors Mike Bostock and Shan Carter in this dense and long episode. It's great to finally have someone from the New York Times! We talk about many practical and more philosophical aspects of publishing interactive visualizations on the web. We also spend quite some time discussing the past, present and future of D3.js.