Data Stories

We have two fantastic guests to talk about using visualization for the good. We have on stage: Kim Rees co-founder of Periscopic, a data visualization company guided by the motto: "do good with data," and Jake Porway, founder of Data Kind, an organization that brings together data scientists and social organizations. We discuss the challenges of working in this world of big data opportunities and the risks and potentially negative implications of using big data.

In this episode we talk about maps and map technology -- how it has evolved and revolutionized the way we think about geography. We have Michal Migurski with us! He is former technology head at Stamen and creator of multiple successful visualizations libraries and tools like Modest Maps and Crimespotting.

We have Santiago Ortiz with us today. Santiago has an impressive array of data visualization projects that he has been pouring out during the last year, and a very unique style. See for yourself in his portfolio website: http://moebio.com/. We talk about the Tapestry Conference, mathematics, the business of data visualization and much much more. Enjoy it!

One year has passed! It looks crazy that we have been doing this thing for a whole year: 18 whole episodes. Thanks a lot everyone for your encouragements and numerous comments and suggestions. And big thanks to all the people who participated! In this episode we review the whole set of posts and comment on them trying to see how they look like from a distance now that some time has passed.

In this episode we talk about Data Sculptures, also known as Physical Visualization. We invite Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen (from the Aviz Lab at INRIA in Paris) to talk about their experiments with physical bar charts and their fantastic collections of physical visualizations. Pierre and Yvonne give several demos you can see on our recorded video. Make sure you don't miss Pierre giving a real-time demo of Jacques Bertin's reorderable matrix!

Happy New Year Friends! We invited a few experts in a Google Hangout to discuss what was big in 2012 and what will happen in 2013. We have Andrew Vande Moere from Infosthetics, Andy Kirk from Visualisingdata and Bryan Connor from The Why Axis.

We've got Robert Kosara on Data Stories for this episode. Robert is the editor of eagereyes.org, one of the most respected and well-known data visualization blogs on the Internet. He is known for his controversial and informative posts and his "academic" style. But Robert, as he says in the show, wears many hats. He was a Professor of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte until recently, when he surprisingly moved to Tableau after being tenured. In the show we talk about his career choice and many other things: vis research, blogging, Tableau, etc.

In our first Data Stories hangout, ten people joined and more followed the stream off-line. We really enjoyed the hangout; it was a fantastic experiment full of interesting questions and comments. Among others, we had Kim Rees from Periscopic, Benjamin Wiederkehr from Interactive Things, Santiago Ortiz, Stephen Boyd, Miska Knapek, Wes Grubbs from Pitch Interactive, Karen Doore from UT Dallas, Yuri Engelhardt and Jim Vallandingham on the show. Quite a mixture! We hope you enjoy the conversation!

Enrico managed to grab a couple of buddies at VisWeek and record a low-fi episode with some on-the-spot comments. Andrew Vande Moere (infosthetics.com) and Jerome Cukier joined in to have some fun and indulge in some gossiping.

Hi, we have Alberto Cairo on the show for Episode #12! If you don't know who Alberto is, well... it's your fault! Check his web site first. He has a fantastic book out on Infographics and Visualization called "The Functional Art," which can directly go in your shelf between the Tuftes and the Fews. We talk about the book and many many other things. Alberto is so talkative and deep that we could have recorded for another three or four hours. Lots, lots of fun! We loved it.

In this episode we talk about emoto, the project on visualizing the sentiment of the Olympic Games in London 2012. Since Moritz was one of the principal designers and developers behind the project, we thought: "hey, why not?!" And we have a special guest! Stephan Thiel from Studio NAND joined us to share his own view and experience with the project. Make sure to give a look to the emoto web site and the accompanying blog before listening to the podcast if you can, this will help you following our discussion... just in case you are not familiar with the project yet...just in case.

In this episode we have the honor of talking with "data illustrator" Stefanie Posavec. Stefanie makes fascinating hand-crafted visualizations like Literary Organism and (En)tangled Word Bank. Most of her work is done by hand, like the highlighted text of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Her work is so intriguing that we wanted to know more about her process.

In this episode we talk about bridging academia and industry. We've touched upon this issue many times in the past that we decided to record a whole a special issue about it. To help us, we invited Danyel Fisher, a renowned Information Visualization researcher from Microsoft Research. This year Danyel is chairing the newly established Industry Track at VisWeek 2012, the leading conference in visualization, and his job is to attract more people from industry to this traditionally fairly academic conference. We discuss existing practices, gaps, and ways to bridge them.

We are raising the bar here! In this new episode we have Jeff Heer, Assistant Professor at Stanford and creator of 4 (!) data visualization toolkits/languages (Prefuse, Flare, Protovis, D3). Jeff is a very well regarded researcher in the area of visualization, user interfaces and human-computer interaction. If you don't know him yet we strongly encourage you to give a look at his projects web page. You'll find lots of cool stuff there like his studies on Graphical Perception and Wrangler, a data pre-processing tool. We talk about the past, present and future of visualization; everything dressed with LOLs, a bit of gossip and...one scoop at the end of the podcast!

We talk about color, and color you know... it's huge. To get some help we invited Gregor Aisch from Driven By Data and asked him to talk about his experience with color and his super useful library chroma.js.