Data Stories 065 | What Happened in Vis in 2015? Year Review with Andy Kirk and Robert Kosara
Hey yo!
Another turn of the year is approaching and we take some time to reflect with our classic guests Andy Kirk and Robert Kosara on what has happened in 2015: “What where the major trends? Big debates? Best visualizations? New tools? Etc.” We’ve even put our predictions in writing — you can read them in our transcript of this episode here.
This was a great year for Data Stories, with a total of 22 episodes (our record so far!). We want to thank our fantastic collaborators Destry and Florian for their great support with running the show, our guests for spending time talking with us, and of course all of you for listening to Data Stories!
Happy 2016! Enjoy the holidays and we’ll see you on January with a ton of new stuff from our side. Stay tuned!
Data Stories is brought to you by Qlik, who allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Check out a new blog post from the Qlik Blog called “People Are Smart: Data Literacy and Broad Audiences”. As you may know Data Literacy is a subject we love to talk about! 
Most popular episodes
- Data Stories #56: Amanda Cox on Working With R, NYT Projects, Favorite Data
- Data Stories #52: Science Communication at SciAm w/ Jen Christiansen
- Data Stories #57: Visualizing Human Development w/ Max Roser[a]
Major Trends Of 2015
Cartogram, NPR
- Cartograms, gridded maps (Collection of links in first item here, Hexmaps, London map, Bear map)
- Machine learning / image processing, etc. (e.g. use of satellite images)
- 3D and VR (NYT Cardboard Experiment)
- Better storytelling
- Data podcasts
- Mobile vis
Major Debates/Issues
Design/Redesign
- Vis ethics: debate on aesthetizing negative data — and Sarah Slobin’s recommendations
- Data visualization criticism – Design/redesign article
- The Stephen Few / Alberto Cairo / David Mccandleuss debate
- Stephen Few’s Visualization research a pseudoscience
- Dogmatic rules vs. flexibility
Great New Visualizations
understanding neural networks through deep visualization
- Dear Data
- Hear our episode with Dear Data
- Pace of social change
- 100 years of Tax Brackets
- Draw how family income affects children’s college chances
- Visualization of what neural networks see “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks” and “Understanding Neural Networks Through Deep Visualization”
- What’s really warming the world?
- Network effect
- Seagull sky trails
- What Happens When the Fed Raises Rates, In One Rube Goldberg Machine
Research/Academic Developments
CONNECTED SCATTER PLOT STUDY BY HAROZ, KOSARA AND FRANCONERI
- Papers on presentation-related topics (ISOTYPE, Connected Scatterplot, Bar chart embellishments)
- ISOTYPE: http://steveharoz.com/research/isotype/
- Connected Scatterplot: http://steveharoz.com/research/connected_scatterplot/
- Bar chart Embellishments: http://kosara.net/papers/2015/Skau-EuroVis-2015.pdf
- Enrico’s deceiving vis paper at CHI
- Borkin et al. on Memorability at VIS
- Hear our episode on the IEEE VIS ’15 Conference
- Seeing Data – Visualisation Literacy
- How do People Make Sense of Unfamiliar Visualization? A Grounded Model of Novice’s Information Visualization Sensemaking by Sukwon Lee, Sung-Hee Kim, Ya-Hsin Hung, Heidi Lam, Youn-ah Kang, and Ji Soo Yi
- Personal visualization: e.g. http://hcitang.org/papers/2015-tvcg-pva.pdf and http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/cg/preprint/07106391.pdf
Notable People, Companies, Studios
Domestic Data streamers
- Bostock leaving NYT, Shan Carter, the rising star of Gregor Aisch
- Chad Skelton leaving Vancouver Sun
- Notable appointments at FT (Alan Smith OBE)
- London: After the flood, Signal/Noise, Tekja
- Domestic Data Streamers
- Hear our episode on Domestic Data Streamers
New Books
- Tamara Munzner, Visualization Analysis and Design
- Hear our episode with Tamara Munzner
- Stephanie Evergreen, Presenting Data Effectively: Communicating Your Findings for Maximum Impact
- Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling with Data
New titles coming up:
- Andy Kirk’s new book “Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data-Driven Design”, May 2016
- Alberto Cairo’s new book “The Truthful Art”
- Hear our episode with Alberto Cairo and Robert Kosara
- Dear Data book (September 2016)
Blogs
visualising data BLOG
- This guy Andy’s website (Kantar Information Is Beautiful Award)
- Visual Complexity – 10 years! 1000 projects!
- Reddit AMAs (Alberto, Tamara, Robert, Nate Silver, Hadley Wickham, David McCandless, Nathan Yau, Mike Bostock)
- Eagereyes (not new but still awesome)
- Flowingdata
Podcasts
Software / Libraries / Tools
VOYAGER VISUALIZATION TOOL DEVELOPED AT IDL FROM UW
- Vizable
- The end of Many Eyes
- Vega, Vegalite, etc. vs. D3
- Brunel
- Voyager and related tools
- Trifacta Data Wrangling tool
- React.js
- Mapzen, CartoDB, Mapbox
Events and specific talks
What was your highlight?
- OpenVis Conference
- Visualized
- resonate
- art+bits
- Tapestry
- Loops talk by Lena Groeger
What’s next in 2016? Wishes?
- Our expectations from last year’s edition
Happy New Year Everyone!