Data Stories

Hey, we talk about space and spacecrafts in this episode! We have Rachel Binx on the show to discuss her experience developing data visualization software for NASA JPL. NASA operators need to look at telemetry data coming from spacecrafts to make sense of what is happening in our skies. Super fascinating topic. On the show we talk about the project, the process for NASA data collection and analysis, and how to write code that goes into space! You can find the transcript for this episode here. Enjoy the show. This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Quadrigram, a web based application designed to bring data stories to life. With Quadrigram you can create and share interactive data stories without the need of any coding skills. LINKS Rachel Binx: http://rachelbinx.com/ NASA JPL: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ Design notes on the Vortex project: http://rachelbinx.com/Vortex  Sommer, Robin, and Vern Paxson. “Outside the closed world: On using machine learning for network intrusion detection.” Security and Privacy (SP), 2010 IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 2010. Rachel’s Project on MTV Music Awards w/ Stamen: http://rachelbinx.com/2012-MTV-Video-Music-Awards React.js https://facebook.github.io/react/ Dealing with time / Moment.js http://momentjs.com/

We have a nice trio on the show for this episode: Jeremy Boy is a postdoctoral researcher at NYU School of Engineering, Helen Kennedy is Professor of Digital Society at University of Sheffield, and Andy Kirk is our beloved editor at visualisingdata.com. We talk with these three experts about Data Visualization Literacy — that is, how people read data visualizations. We ask, how do we measure literacy? How do we improve it? And how do we even define literacy when we’re asking our viewers to read images? Jeremy talks about his research on methods to measure visualization literacy, while Helen and Andy discuss their Seeing Data project, which studies how people read visualizations. If you prefer reading to listening, you can find the transcript of our episode here. Enjoy the show! Data Stories is brought to you by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Let your instincts lead the way to create personalized visualizations and dynamic dashboards with Qlik Sense. Download Qlik Sense for free at www.qlik.de/datastories. This week, the Qlik blog features a great post on maps and the data literacy required to read them called “Here Be Dragons.” LINKS Andy Kirk: visualisingdata.com Helen Kennedy: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/socstudies/staff/staff-profiles/helen-kennedy Jeremy Boy: http://jyby.eu/ Seeing Data Project: http://seeingdata.org   Seeing Data Results: http://www.visualisingdata.com/2015/10/views-from-seeing-data-research-part-1/ http://www.visualisingdata.com/2015/12/views-from-seeing-data-research-part-2/ http://www.visualisingdata.com/2016/02/views-from-seeing-data-research-part-3/ Three funded PhD Studentships at University of Sheffield: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/socstudies/prospt/ppr/scholarships/datanetwork   Some research papers on data visualization literacy: Boy, Jeremy, et al. “A principled way of assessing visualization literacy.“Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on 20.12 (2014): 1963-1972. Lee, Sukwon, et al. “How do People Make Sense of Unfamiliar Visualizations?: A Grounded Model of Novice’s Information Visualization Sensemaking.” Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on 22.1 (2016): 499-508. Börner, Katy, et al. “Investigating aspects of data visualization literacy using 20 information visualizations and 273 science museum visitors.” Information Visualization (2015): 1473871615594652.   Some other interesting projects: Vis Literacy Workshop (at InfoVis): http://visualizationliteracy.org/workshop Vis Literacy at Purdue: https://engineering.purdue.edu/HIVELab/wiki/pmwiki.php/VisualizationLiteracy Vis Literacy Workshop (at EuroVis): https://www.kth.se/profile/178785/page/eurovis-2014-workshop-towards-visualiza/   Related episodes Information+ Conference ReviewVisualization Literacy in Elementary School with Basak Alper and Nathalie RicheData Is Personal with Evan Peck

We have Miriah Meyer (Assistant Professor at Univ. of Utah) and Nina McCurdy (PhD student at Univ. of Utah) on Data Stories for a project episode about the lovely Poemage, “a visualization system for exploring the sonic topology of a poem.” Miriah and Nina worked hand-in-hand with a group of poets to design a tool that visualizes a poem and, as such, provides inspiration for interesting poetic structures and solutions. On the show we talk about how they derived phonological information from text, how the project evolved, and how data visualization tools can be designed to support creativity. Listen here or read the transcript. Either way, enjoy the show!   This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Quadrigram, a web based application designed to bring data stories to life. With Quadrigram you can create and share interactive data stories without needing any coding skills. LINKS Nina McCurdy bio: http://ninamccurdy.com/ Miriah Meyer bio: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~miriah/ Overview of Poemage: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~nmccurdy/Poemage/   Poemage Paper: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~nmccurdy/Poemage/images/Poemage.pdf Pronunciation and the CMU Dictionary: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/just-say

We have Hadley Wickham on the show, Chief Scientist at RStudio and Adjunct Professor of Statistics at Rice University and the University of Auckland. Hadley created a number of hugely popular libraries for the R language, including ggplot2, which is used throughout the world to analyze and present data. On the show we talk about his creative process to develop ggplot2, its growing popularity, other libraries he has built in the R ecosystem, and strategies for creating popular software for data analysis and visualization. Enjoy listening to Hadley Wickham, or read the transcript from our interview here! Data Stories is brought to you by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Take part in the Open Data Challenge for a chance to win $10,000 for an app created with Qlik Sense! LINKS Project Ukko: http://www.project-ukko.net/ Hadley Wickham: http://hadley.nz/ | https://github.com/hadley/ ggplot2: http://ggplot2.org/ ggplot extensions: http://ggplot2-exts.github.io Hadley’s R packages for data analysis (ggplot2, plyr, reshape2) R: https://www.r-project.org/ tidyr: http://blog.rstudio.org/2014/07/22/introducing-tidyr/ Visualizing travel data with TripIt: https://www.tripit.com/ RStudio Shiny (interactive web graphics with R): http://shiny.rstudio.com/ Functional Reactive Programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programming Beautiful data visualization done with ggplot2: http://spatial.ly/2014/09/london-information-capital/ Mike LaCour’s scandalous graphs (clearly done with ggplot2): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1366.full Wilkinson’s The Grammar of Graphics: http://www.amazon.com/The-Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Computing/dp/0387245448 Tableau: http://www.tableau.com/ d3.js: http://d3js.org/ ggvis and shiny: http://ggvis.rstudio.com/ | http://shiny.rstudio.com/ R tutorials: https://www.datacamp.com/ https://www.coursera.org/learn/r-programming http://swirlstats.com/

Happy New Year everyone, we are back! In this episode we talk with Ben Wellington about his blog I Quant NY, where he writes about surprising facts he finds analyzing NYC open data. Some of his stories include how he discovered that “… Software in Half of NYC Cabs Generates $5.2 Million a Year in Extra Tips,” ideas on “How to Fix NYC’s No-Cabs-At-4PM Problem” and “How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year” by detecting fire hydrants that generate too many parking tickets. On the show Ben talks about how he generates new ideas, how he finds and analyzes the data, and how he turns this into amazing stories for his blog. We also talk about the impact his work had on New York City and the interesting reactions some of his blog posts have generated. Enjoy Ben and his amazing NYC data stories, and read a transcript of our interview here! This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Quadrigram, a web based application designed to bring data stories to life. With Quadrigram you can create and share interactive data stories without the need of any coding skills.   LINKS Moritz’s project on place names – http://truth-and-beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/ Our Guest Ben Wellington – https://about.me/benwellington I Quant NY – http://iquantny.tumblr.com Some favorite I Quant NY posts: “You’ll Never Guess the Cleanest Fast Food Joint in NYC” “Half of Manhattan is Within 4 Blocks of a Starbucks” “How Software in Half of NYC Cabs Generates $5.2 Million a Year in Extra Tips” “How to Fix NYC’s No-Cabs-At-4PM Problem” “Success: How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year” Tools Ben uses for I Quant NY: iPython:  http://ipython.org/ iPython Notebook Pandas: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/tutorials.html QGIS: http://www.qgis.org/en/site/ CartoDB: https://cartodb.com/

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   PolicyViz Data Skeptic Tableau Wannabe Podcast 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! Related episodes Data Vis Around the World in 2016

Hey folks, It’s time for another project-centric episode, and we finally talk about one of our favorite projects of the year — “Dear Data”  by the most fabulous tag team of data illustrators around: Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. Their year-long project is about how “two women who switched continents get to know each other through the data they draw and send across the pond” and consists of 104 hand–drawn postcards all of which document one week of their lives. How much they cursed, laughed, read, smiled at strangers, … — all of this is documented in inventive, charming and very analogue ways. Learn all about the project — how they started it, what they learned, and how it will live on — in the episode. Links mentioned: Yay for slow data! Reporter app: http://www.reporter-app.com/ Notebook app: http://www.notebooksapp.com/ And read the episode transcript here! Data Stories is brought to you by Qlik, who allow you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Check out this fun experiment on the qlik blog: “What Chart are You?”. And, make sure to try out Qlik Sense, which you can download for free at www.qlik.de/datastories.

In our latest episode, Enrico recaps the IEEE VIS’15 conference with Robert Kosara and Johanna Fulda, and we compare notes about conference projects and papers. Find the transcript here, and check out our long list of selected projects below with plenty of links and video previews! 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! LINKS, IMAGES, AND VIDEO PREVIEWS 1. Tutorial: Tamara Munzner on Visualization Analysis and Design    Check out her presentation slides here. You’ll love this if: You want to get better at teaching in the design space.   2. Keynote: Donna Cox on Scientific Visualization Check out her keynote description here. You’ll love this if: You want to use your scientific research to generate, analyze, and/or visualize data using advanced digital resources. And if you do, submit to this call for participation!   3. Presentation: Julian Stahnke on Interaction and Multi-Dimensionality Probing Projections helps to visualize similarities and differences in datasets by looking at data in different dimensions. Read the paper here. You’ll love this if: You’ve always wanted to understand how multi-dimensional scaling works.   4. Presentation: Stef van den Elzen on Network Representation through Time Stef van den Elzen has figured out how to represent changing networks on a scatterplot with multidimensional scaling. Read the paper here. You’ll love this if: You’ve been wondering how to represent changing relationships over time.   5. Presentation: Steve Kieffer on Human Network Creation Steve Kieffer and his team developed a new automatic network layout algorithm to mirror the way networks are represented by actual people, rather than computers. Read the paper here. You’ll love this if: You’re curious to see how humans and computers map networks differently — and you want to know how closely an algorithm can mimic human design.   6. Presentation: Melanie Tory on Personal Data Visualization Melanie Tory presents a taxonomy of design for individuals to visualize and analyze their personal data. Read the paper here. You’ll love this if: You have a habit of collecting data about yourself.   7. Presentation: Wesley Willet on Visualizing Notes A look at how visualizations can help improve personal note-taking practices and information retention, read the paper here. You’ll love this if: You might like to learn to visualize your own notes, or improve your note-taking habits.   8. Presentation: P. Samuel Quinan and Miriah Meyer on Visualizations in Weather Forecasts WeaVER integrates existing conventions for visualizing weather forecasts with principles of effective design, and compares different features across a multitude of forecasting tools. See the project site here. You’ll love this if: You’re passionate about implementing visualization best practices in functional ways.   9. Presentation: Aritra Dasgupta on Visualizing and Comparing Climate Models Visualization experts and climate scientists worked together to develop a taxonomy to map climate patterns. Read the paper here. You’ll love this if: You’re interested in cross-disciplinary collaboration between researchers, designers, and practitioners.   10. Presentation: Nina McCurdy on Poetry Visualization Poemage visualizes the sonic topography of a poem. A tool for inspiration, it is designed to help poets see rhyme differently and come up with new ideas. See the project page here. You’ll love this if: You appreciate computation tools that help us to celebrate ambiguity.   11. Presentation: Michelle Borkin on Visualization Memorability  How do we recall the visualizations that we have seen? Michelle Borkin and her team study human eye movements to find out. Read the paper here. You’ll love this if: You’re interested in the user-side of data visualization.   12. Presentation: Jeremy Boy on Visual Cues for Interactivity  Do certain visual cues more effectively encourage participants to interact with a visualization? This is just one of the questions that interests Jeremy Boy. Read the paper here. You’ll love this: You’d like some tricks and tools to increase user engagement.   13. New Tools: Voyager and Reactive Vega Voyager suggests which kind of chart you should select, depending on your purposes. Read the paper about it here. Reactive Vega offers a declarative format for creating, saving, and sharing interactive visualizations. Read the paper about it here. You’ll love these if: You want to streamline your visualization creation process.   14. Presentation: Johanna Fulda, Matthew Brehmer, and Tamara Munzner on Visual Timelines             A solution to the headache of designing timelines, TimelineCurator uses natural language processing to build easy streamlined timelines. Play with it here. You’ll love this if: You’ve been craving a user-friendly process for putting together a timeline. These are just a handful of the VIS’15 presentations, panels, and tools that we loved. Listen to the episode to hear about more, let us know which projects excited you, and consider attending VIS’16 next year in Baltimore.   Related episodes Highlights from IEEE VIS'19 with Tamara Munzner and Robert KosaraHighlights from IEEE VIS'22 with Tamara Munzner

We have Assistant Professor Chris Collins from University of Ontario Institute of Technology on the show to talk about text visualization. Chris explains what Text Vis is, provides examples from his and others’ work, describes tools and knowledge to get started, and looks into the future of the field, including its challenges and opportunities. And here’s a really cool new thing — we have a transcript of the whole show! Browse the text, search for quotes and chapters, and maybe even… visualize it? Let us know if it’s useful! Enjoy the show! LINKS Chris Collins and His Lab FluxFlow (twitter rumors detection and visualization) | See also “How riot rumours spread on Twitter” (from the Guardian) Probing Projections Project DocuBurst Patterns in Passwords Book: “Graphs, Maps, and Trees” Lexichrome (visualizing the color of words) Literature Fingerprinting (showing how different authors write) (PDF) Visualizing Text Readability (PDF) Text visualization browser (collection/taxonomy of text vis projects) [good place to start looking into text vis!] NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) Wordnet This episode is sponsored by Qlik who allows you to explore hidden relationships within data that lead to insights. Check out the virtual event on Nov 18: Are you seeing the whole story that lives within your data? You can download Qlik Sense for free at: www.qlik.de/datastories.   Related episodes Data Conversations with Vidya Setlur

— Hey, before we start, we ask you a favor: rate us on iTunes! This has a huge impact on how the show is ranked. To rate us on iTunes follow this link and then select “view in iTunes” (you need to have iTunes installed) and then click on “Ratings & Reviews”. You can also rate us directly from your Apple podcast player if you have one. Thanks!!! — Here we go with a new project episode! This time we talk with Lisa Charlotte Rost about her project “My Google Search History.” Lisa is a visualization designer based in Berlin and the project is about how she collected and visualized her google search history to look into her personal data. In the episode we discuss how she came up with the idea and all the steps she followed to realize it. She has also a nice page on github with code that you can reuse to do the same thing with your own data! Here is a set of pictures from her project: This episode is sponsored by Qlik who allows you to explore hidden relationships within data that lead to insights. Check out the new blog post on the qlik blog called: “The role of multiple devices in our workspaces” by Donald Farmer. And, there is a big Qlik Sense Roadshow with over 100 events in Europe. You can download Qlik Sense for free at: www.qlik.de/datastories. LINKS Lisa’s home page Lisa’s tutorial on making histograms in R Lisa’s tutorial on how to make your own google search visualization Lisa’s tutorial on text analysis with R Take a look at the classic Wolfram’s Personal Analytics project And of course see our episode with Nick Felton about his annual reports Related episodes Polygraph and The Journalist Engineer Matt DanielsDatawrapper with Lisa C. Rost and Gregor Aisch