The PolicyViz Podcast

Micah is a mathematician who likes to use pictures to understand things. He runs a website, hockeyviz.com, where he stores pictures about hockey. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with his wife and his two children.Episode NotesMicah | Twitter | SiteBubble physicsPythonBeautiful SoupsvgwriteMatplotlibLine-width illusionRelated EpisodesEpisode #238: Jeremy Ney Episode #237: Tristan Gullevin Episode #194: Charlie SmartiTunesSpotifyStitcherTuneInGoogle PodcastsPolicyViz NewsletterYouTubeSponsorUse my special link (

Jeremy is the author of American Inequality, a biweekly newsletter that uses data visualization to highlight U.S. inequality topics and to drive change in communities. His work has been published in TIME, Bloomberg, and the LA Times. He was a dual-degree masters student at MIT Sloan and the Harvard Kennedy School and was formerly a macro policy strategist at the Federal Reserve. He now works at Google and lives in Brooklyn.Episode NotesJeremy on Twitter | Op-ed in TimeAmerican Inequality newsletter: americaninequality.substack.comFederal Reserve Bank of New YorkFood Deserts and InequalityTechnology and Disability: The Relationship Between Broadband Access and Disability Insurance AwardsSome coverage of the map: American Inequality  Paul Krugman  David Wallace-Wells  LA TimesRelated EpisodesEpisode #228: Ethan MollickEpisode #224: Pieta Blakely and Eli HolderEpisode #191: Sarah WilliamsiTunesSpotifyStitcherTuneIn

Tristan is a Data Visualization Freelancer who likes to combine different techniques to find the best way to represent data. He regularly creates tools and videos to help people build their next projects or level up their skills. Tristan is the 2017 Iron Viz Champion, and current Tableau Visionary.Episode NotesTristan | Web | Twitter | YouTubeFigmaObservablePowerBISvelteTableauTableau PublicRelated EpisodesEpisode #234: Kirk Munroe Episode #230: Vidya Setlur and Bridget Cogley Episode #211: Jock D. MackinlayEpisode #209: The Flerlage TwinsiTunesSpotifyStitcherTuneInGoogle PodcastsPolicyViz Newsletter

Gabrielle Ione Hickmon (b. 1994) is a Black woman from a middle place—Ypsilanti, MI. Her lab is a place where clay and words meet. She is interested in body memory, waiting rooms, layovers, circles, Black imaginaries, and ocular proof. Her work includes essays, ethnographic research, and coil-built ceramics. She won Bronze in the Leisure, Games, & Sport category of the 2022 Information is Beautiful Awards and First Honorable Mention in the 2022 NYU American Journalism Online Awards for her ethnographic research project, How You Play Spades is How You Play Life: Spades in the African American Community. Her writing has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, The Baffler, The Pudding, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She attended Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. She has been in residence at Pocoapoco, Mas Palou, and will soon be in residence at Dairy Hollow, Mudhouse, and Haystack.  Gabrielle is currently at work on The Boyne City Project, a series of vessels chronicling her family history in Michigan which dates back to before the Great Migration, an essay collection, and a memoir. She works out of a studio in Ann Arbor, MI.Episode NotesGabrielle | Web | Instagram | TwitterHow You Play Spades Is How You Live Life at The PuddingInformation is Beautiful AwardsMixed-ish from Kenya BarrisDo No Harm Project from the Urban InstituteNvivoMatt Daniels at the PuddingiTunesSpotifyStitcherTuneInGoogle Podcasts

Jen Christiansen is the author of Building Science Graphics: An Illustrated Guide to Communicating Science through Diagrams and Visualizations (CRC Press) and senior graphics editor at Scientific American, where she art directs and produces illustrated explanatory diagrams and data visualizations.Episode NotesJen | Web | Book | Book siteScientific AmericaniTunesSpotifyStitcherTuneInGoogle PodcastsPolicyViz NewsletterYouTubeSponsorUse my special link (https://zen.ai/policyviz12) to save 12% at blendjet.com. The discount will be applied at checkout!New Ways to Support the Show!With more than 200 guests and eight seasons of episodes, the PolicyViz Podcast is one of the longest-running data visualization podcasts around. You can support the show by downloading and listening, following the work of my guests, and sharing the show with your networks. I’m grateful to everyone who listens and supports the show, and now I’m offering new exciting ways for you to support the show financially. You can check out the special paid version of my newsletter, receive text messages with special data visualization tips, or go to the simplified Patreon platform. Whichever you choose,

Kirk Munroe is a business analytics and performance management expert. He has held leadership roles in product management, marketing, sales enablement, and customer success in analytics software companies including, Cognos, IBM, Kinaxis, Tableau, and Salesforce. Kirk has a passion for coaching and mentoring people to make better decisions through storytelling with data. He is currently one of the two owners and principal consultants at Paint with Data, a visual analytics consulting firm. Kirk lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.Episode NotesKirk | Web | Twitter Book: Data Modeling with Tableau: A practical guide to building data models using Tableau Prep and Tableau DesktopKirk Munroe: 4 Common Tableau Data Model Problems…and How to Fix ThemRelated EpisodesiTunesSpotifyStitcherTuneInGoogle PodcastsPolicyViz NewsletterYouTubeSponsorAre you ready to earn extra income from sharing your expert opinion? Head over to userinterviews.com/hello to sign up and participate today!New Ways to Support the Show!With more than 200 guests and eight seasons of episodes, the PolicyViz Podcast is one of the longest-running data visualization podcasts around. You can support the show by downloading and listening, following the work of my guests, and sharing the show with your networks. I’m grateful to everyone who listens and supports the show, and now I’m offering new exciting ways for you to support the show financially. You can check out the special paid version of my 

Ellie Balk is an artist obsessed with color, pattern, data and mathematics. She creates large scale data visualization public artworks using paint, glass, sound and most recently ceramics. Community engagement and interaction is at the core of her work. Ellie lives in Brooklyn, while working internationally.  Her public artwork can be experienced across the United State, extensively throughout New York City and St. Louis, Missouri and Internationally in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mae Rim, Thailand in Saint Louis, Senegal and Marrakech, Morocco. Ellie has worked with High schools students across the United States in creating public art that visualizes mathematics and her ideas have been adapted for use in elementary and high school mathematics curriculum. Her work developed with her teaching partner Tricia Stanley (Brooklyn) in Visualizing Mathematics has been published nationally and internationally through the Bridges Conference (Sweden) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (Connecticut, Chicago, New Orleans). She loves when she can use data as a tool to bring people together.  Her visualization workshops have strengthened groups with the Kemper Museum (St. Louis), teams within Google (New York), KOC school (Istanbul, Turkey) and with the National Academy of Design (New York). Ellie holds a Bachelors of Fine Art from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and a Masters of Fine Art from Pratt Institute. Episode NotesEllie | Website | Instagram | Twitter Related EpisodesEpisode #232: Stefanie Posavec and Sonja KuijpersEpisode #187: Stefanie Posavec & Miriam QuickEpisode #2: Dear DataiTunesSpotifyStitcherTuneInGoogle PodcastsPolicyViz Newsletter

Stefanie Posavec is a designer, artist, and author whose practice focuses on finding new, experimental approaches to communicating data and information. This work has been exhibited internationally at major galleries including the V&A, the Design Museum, Somerset House, and the Wellcome Collection (London), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and MoMA (New York). Her work is also in the permanent collection of MoMA. Besides her new book with Miriam, she has also co-authored two books that emphasise a more personal approach to data: Dear Data and the journal Observe, Collect, Draw!Sonja Kuijpers runs STUDIO TERP, her one-woman data illustration studio based in Eindhoven, Netherlands. She designs (data-)visualisations for a diversity of clients such as Scientific American, Philips, as well as small institutions, companies, and publishers. Recently the Climate Book by Greta Thunberg was published, for which Sonja (re-)designed the graphs. Experimenting with shapes and styles, she also designs her own independent dataviz and data art projects. She received an Information is Beautiful Gold Award in 2019 for her personal project ‘A View on despair’. Creating data visualisation, to Sonja, is trying to locate herself in the data, making sense of numbers with a human approach, showing insights as well as the aesthetics of information and data.Episode NotesStefanie | Web | TwitterSonja | Web | Twitter | IIB Award, A View on DespairWarming StripesI am a book. I am a portal to the universe. by Stefanie Posavec and Miriam QuickThe Climate Book, by Greta Thurnberg | Amazon US | Amazon UKRelated EpisodesEpisode #187: Stefanie Posavec & Miriam QuickEpisode #2: Dear DataiTunesSpotify

Lilach Manheim Laurio leads the Data Experience Center of Excellence at Visa, where she helps data practitioners across the company to elevate the quality of their data products, and improve their skills in data visualization and data experience design. Lilach’s data visualization work blends together a background in art history, library science, and human-centered information design, along with a passion for visual metaphor and pun.Lilach has served as a Tableau Zen master (2018-2019), Tableau Public featured author, and co-organizer of her local Tableau user group chapter. She has contributed as guest author to the Tableau blog and the Nightingale journal, writing about design and user experience in data visualization. She has also spoken on topics ranging from visual metaphor to dataviz critique at Tableau conferences and user groups across the U.S.Lilach holds a Bachelor degree in Art History and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS).Episode NotesLilach | Web | Twitter | Tableau PublicVisa Chart ComponentsElevating Data Experiences frameworkChris DeMartini (Twitter)Frank Elavsky (Twitter)Data Visualization SocietyThe Shape Parameter of a Two-Variable Graph (banking to 45 degrees paper from Cleveland, McGill, and McGill)Related blog posts: PolicyViz: A Better Path Toward Criticizing Data Visualization PolicyViz: Should we give awards for data visualizations? PolicyViz: Critiquing a Data Visualization Critique Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg: Design and Redesign in Data VisualizationBooks Functional Aesthetics for Data Visualization Building Science Graphics: An Illustrated Guide to Communicating Science through Diagrams and Visualizations Joyful Infographics: A Friendly, Human Approach to Data Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design Data Literacy Fundamentals: Understanding the Power & Value of Data

Vidya Setlur is the director of Tableau Research. She leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists in areas including data visualization, multimodal interaction, statistics, applied ML, and NLP. She earned her doctorate in Computer Graphics in 2005 at Northwestern University. Prior to joining Tableau, she worked as a principal research scientist at the Nokia Research Center for seven years. Her personal research interests lie at the intersection of natural language processing and computer graphics to better understand data semantics and user intent to inform the meaningful visual depiction of data.Interpreter turned analyst, Bridget Cogley brings an interdisciplinary approach to data analytics. As Chief Visualization Officer at Versalytix, her role uplifts data visualization within the org and helps shape the vision. Her dynamic, engaging presentation style is paired with thought-provoking content, including ethics and data visualization linguistics. She has a deep interest in the nuances of communication, having been an American Sign Language Interpreter for nine years. She is currently a Tableau Hall of Fame Visionary. Her work incorporates human-centric dashboard design, an anthropological take on design, ethics, and language. She extensively covers speech analytics and open text. Prior to consulting, Bridget managed an analytics department, which included vetting and selecting Tableau, creating views in the database, and building comprehensive reporting. She also has experience in training, HR, managing, and sales support.Episode NotesFunctional Aesthetics for Data VisualizationWebinar about the bookVidya | Tableau Research | TwitterBridget | Tableaufit | Twitter | The Logic of Dashboards presentation (YouTube)Paper: Striking a Balance: Reader Takeaways and Preferences when Integrating Text and Charts by Chase Stokes, Vidya Setlur, Bridget Cogley, Arvind Satyanarayan, and Marti HearstVersalytixStroop EffectTableau User GroupsVisCommInformation is Beautiful AwardsOther recent books Jen Christiansen, Building Science Graphics: An Illustrated Guide to Communicating Science through Diagrams and Visualizations Nigel Holmes, Joyful Infographics: A Friendly, Human Approach to DataRelated EpisodesEpisode #211: Jock D. Mackinlay