Data Stories

Hey folks, we are back! We really hope you had a good summer. We start the new season with an “internal” episode. We give numerous updates on Data Stories. Things have changed recently — we have future ideas and two great events to get in touch with us! The Visualized Conference, taking place in New York on Oct 7-10, 2015, is going to host a Data Stories Meetup on Oct 7, 2015. If you live in NYC or happen to be around please drop by! We’d love to meet and talk with you. We will also offer an Ask Me Anything on Reddit on November 3. This is a unique opportunity to ask us questions live and chat together. In the show we also talk about some of our recent projects. Moritz talks about False Positive, an art project on data, privacy and identity. He also talks about the new Inclusive Growth Report from the World Economic Forum, for which he designed the graphics and website together with Stefanie Posavec and 9elements. Enrico talks about the RevEx tool and his collaboration with ProPublica for the analysis of millions of medical Yelp reviews, his work with Human Rights experts and a recently published paper on visualization design with climate scientists. This episode is sponsored by Qlik who allows you to explore hidden relationships within data that lead to insights. Read Patrik Lundblad’s blog posts on the three pillars of data visualization(1,2,3). You can download Qlik Sense for free at: www.qlik.de/datastories. LINKS John Swabisch’s PolicyViz Podcast Data Skeptic Podcast (Enrico’s favorite data podcast) List of Data Science Podcasts – “The 7 Best Data Science and Machine Learning Podcasts“ Data Stories Meetup at Visualized in NYC (sign-up here!) Data Is Beautiful on Reddit (where our Ask Me Anything will happen) False Positive (Moritz’s project on personal data on the web) RevEx (Enrico’s project on analyzing healthcare reviews from Yelp) Inclusive Growth (Moritz’s project on visualizing growth) Upcoming Conferences: VIS’15 | Kikk Festival | art+bits festival

“Different people, working for different institutions, in different countries, at different times, all come up with the same answer …” – Eric Roston, Bloomberg (talking about global warming) Hi folks! We have Blacki Migliozzi and Eric Roston from Bloomberg on the show to talk about their recent data graphic piece on climate change called “What’s Really Warming The World?” The graphic shows, through a “scrollytelling,” what factors may influence the world’s temperature according to well-established climate models. It guides you through a series of questions and visuals to all you to see for yourself what correlates (spoiler: carbon emissions) and what does not. On the show we talk about how the Bloomberg team came up with this piece, their interaction with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) scientists who developed the model, and the many challenges of translating important scientific knowledge into more digestible, but not simplistic, articles that everyone can read. We also talk about how they took inspiration from the children book “Where’s Spot?” (which is a nice narrative technique for vis!) and all the delicate design decisions they had to make. … And don’t miss the moment when Eric drops the huge IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report book to give a sense of how big it is! Enjoy the show! — This episode is sponsored by Qlik who allows you to explore hidden relationships within data that lead to insights. Qlik was named a Top 10 Innovative Growth Company by Forbes, and they published an interesting blog post analyzing the data from the ranking. Check it out! Qlik Sense allows you to create personalized visualizations and dynamic dashboards. You can download it for free at: www.qlik.de/datastories. — LINKS What’s Really Warming the World? – the Bloomberg graphics “Where’s Spot?” kids book The CIMIP5 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (61 models from 28 countries evaluated and compared) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (the big tome) The IPCC synthesis reports (much shorter and easier to read / so many visuals could be improved!) Data on global land and ocean temperature records from NASA Scientific article on NASA GISS historical simulations Article on how temperature anomalies are calculated Datasets from the Bloomberg team: Observed land-ocean temperature Responses to climate forcings 850 year Preindustrial control experiment Related episodes Polygraph and The Journalist Engineer Matt Daniels

“I believe we are bored from being 8 to 10 hours everyday in front of the screen, so when we go out from the screen the real life happens and things get more and more interesting.” – Dani Llugany Pearson — Hey everyone, starting from this episode we will add images/photos of projects and ideas discussed on the show so that you no longer have to guess what we are talking about! Try this one below … if you click on it you’ll get high-res pictures. Let us know if you like it! Hi folks, We have Dani Llugany Pearson from Domestic Data Streamers to talk about their studio and the amazing participatory data installations that they make. You really need to see examples of what they do! Go to http://domesticstreamers.com/ and take a look at their projects. In Data Strings they ask people to add their own thread to a set of physical parallel coordinates. In Life Line they use a grid of 800 balloons to show the point between one’s real age and the age at which one would like to die. In Golden Age they use a grid to let people mark with a log what is their age and what they believe is the best age in people’s life. On the show we talk about how they got started and the process behind some of their projects. Enjoy the show! — This episode is sponsored by Qlik who allows you to explore hidden relationships within data that lead to insights. Qlik Sense allows you to create personalized visualizations and dynamic dashboards. You can download it for free at: www.qlik.de/datastories. — LINKS Domestic Data Steamers Paper on “Weight as an Embodiment of Importance” Yotta Project Data Strings The Mood Test Lifeline Golden Age Drip By Tweet Related episodes Touch Graphics with Steve Landau

We have economist Max Roser from University of Oxford to talk about his Our World in Data project where he visualizes the social, economic, and environmental history of humanity up to the present day. Our World in Data is a remarkable project that Max started on his own and worked on little by little in his spare time until it evolved into a full website with plenty of interesting data, presentations, and visualizations to to better understand humanity. The nicest thing is that it provides a quite positive picture of the world and about the many ways that we are improving our conditions. Go to the website (http://ourworldindata.org/) and take a look at War and Violence, Poverty, Global Heath, Etc. On the show we talk about how Max started his work; the process behind finding a topic, collecting, and curating the data; and producing these nice visuals that people can easily understand. We also talk about human biases, persuasion, and how Max learned to build web sites and visualizations. Enjoy the show! — This episode is sponsored by Visualizing Well-Being, the Wikiprogress Data Visualization Contest 2015. Enter the contest to win a trip to Mexico! To find out more, visit the Wikiprogress website (www.wikiprogress.org) or the facebook page or follow @wikiprogress on twitter. — LINKS Our World in Data – http://ourworldindata.org Some of the projects: War and Peace – http://ourworldindata.org/data/war-peace/war-and-peace-before-1945/ Suicide – http://ourworldindata.org/data/health/suicide/ Violence http://ourworldindata.org/VisualHistoryOf/Violence.html#/title-slide Chartbook of economic inequality Pinker’s Book: Better Angles Of Our Nature Notebook software – Circus Ponies Scott Murray’s D3.js Book Hans Rosling’s Gapminder Presentation Zdenek Hynek – http://www.geographics.cz/

“I’d give two of my left fingers for this data” – Amanda Cox on the show We have the great Amanda Cox from the New York Times on the show this time! Amanda is a graphic editor at NYT and she is behind many of the amazing data graphics that the New York Times has produced in recent years. In the show we talk about her background in statistics and how she ended up at the Times. We discuss how she uses R software to collect, analyze, and visualize data, and her thoughts on other tools. We also talk about how data graphics are produced at NYT, with lots of funny stories. Don’t miss the parts about the “what, where, when” of data and the “net joy” concept. Lots a data wisdom in this show! — This episode is sponsored by Tableau Software,  helping people connect to any kind of data, and visualize it on the fly – You can download a free trial at http://tableau.com/datastories – check the new Tableau 9! — LINKS Hadley Wickham – http://had.co.nz/ R Studio – http://shiny.rstudio.com/ Jake Barton: Local Projects – http://localprojects.net/about/ NYT Project: The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares NYT Project: You Draw It: How Family Income Predicts Children’s College Chances Amanda and Kevin’s NYU Data Journalism Course Quadrigram – http://www.quadrigram.com/ (tool for data-driven web sites) Jeff Heer and his IDL Lab at UW – http://idl.cs.washington.edu/ FiveThirtyEight – http://fivethirtyeight.com/ The Upshot – http://www.nytimes.com/upshot/?_r=0

Hi everyone! We have designer and activist Mushon Zer-Aviv on the show today. Mushon is an NYU ITP graduate and instructor at Shenkar University, Israel. He wrote the very interesting Disinformation Visualization piece for Tactical Tech’s Visualizing Information for Advocacy and we decided to invite him to discuss the million different facets of disinformation through visualization. Is data and data visualization bringing some truth or should it always be considered an argument? Is there a way we can mitigate or even prevent disinformation? What strategies can designers use to make their opinions more apparent? These are some of the questions we discuss on the show. And don’t miss the part on “data obfuscation,” that is, how to use disinformation to increase our privacy! Enjoy this thought-provoking show! This episode is sponsored by Tableau Software,  helping people connect to any kind of data, and visualize it on the fly – You can download a free trial at http://tableau.com/datastories – check the new Tableau 9! LINKS Mushon Zer-Aviv – http://mushon.com Shual Design Studio – http://shual.com Eyebeam / ShiftSpace – http://eyebeam.org Mushon’s Article: Disinformation visualization – How To Lie With Data Visualization Enrico et al.’s papers on vis persuasion and deception: How Deceptive are Deceptive Visualizations?: An Empirical Analysis of Common Distortion Techniques. A. V. Pandey, K. Rall, M. Sattarthwaite, O. Nov, E. Bertini. Proc. of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2015. The Persuasive Power of Data Visualization. A. V. Pandey, O. Nov, A. Manivannan, M. Satterthwaite, and E. Bertini. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. of InfoVis), vol. 20, no. 12, pp. 2211 – 2220, 2014. Encoding / Decoding Model of Communication (wikipedia page) Edward Tufte’s Book: Beautiful Evidence Weinberger’s Book: Too Big To Know ISVIS http://www.isvisshenkar.org/ (israeli data visualization conference) Visualizing the Israeli Budget – oBudget.org AdNauseam – http://adnauseam.io (data obfuscation tool) Floodwatch – https://floodwatch.o-c-r.org (privacy vis tool from OCR) Columbia Professor Laura Kurgan NYU Professor Helen Nissenbaum Artist and Researcher Daniel C. Howe

[This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Tableau. You can download a free trial at http://tableau.com/datastories – check the new Tableau 9!] Hi all! We have Miriah Meyer with us in this episode to talk about how to build interactive data visualization tools for scientists and researchers. Miriah is Assistant Professor at University of Utah and one of the leading experts on the process of designing data visualizations for scientific discovery. To know more about her, take a look at her talk at TEDxWaterloo and her projects page, where she has numerous links to applications she developed in biology and other domains (see for instance MizBee and Pathline). On the show we talk about her work on analyzing and understanding the design process: required steps, major pitfalls and tips on how to collaborate with domain scientists. We also talk about her recent fascinating ethnographic work on “Reflections on How Designers Design With Data” and her ongoing work on building visualization tools for poetry! Enjoy the show! LINKS Miriah’s Home Page Miriah’s Projects TEDxWaterloo – Miriah Meyer – Information Visualization for Scientific Discovery Paper: How Designers Design With Data [ethnographic study] Paper: Design Study Methodology: Reflections from the Trenches and the Stacks [on the visualization design process] Paper: Visualization Collaborations What Works and Why The Lyra Visualization Design Environment (VDE) Paper: Overview: The Design, Adoption, and Analysis of a Visual Document Mining Tool For Investigative Journalists – Matthew Brehmer, Stephen Ingram, Jonathan Stray, and Tamara Munzner [one rare case of adoption study]

[This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Tableau. You can download a free trial at http://tableau.com/datastories  – check the new Tableau 9!] Hi folks! We have Benedikt Groß with us on the show. Benedikt defines himself as a “speculative and computational designer who works antidisciplinarily.” Benedikt graduated from the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art and he works for his studio in Stuttgart, Germany. He is the co-author of ‘Generative Design,’ one of the standard books on the topic. In the show we talk about some of his amazing data projects at the intersection of art, design, science, sociology, etc. Aerial Bold, for instance, is a project about searching satellite images to find buildings and geographic features that look like letters. The Big Atlas of LA Pools, is a project about mapping all pools in LA. And Population.io is about showing demographic data in an engaging way and even giving you a prediction of when you are going to die! This is an amazing episode with stories about how Bill Gates crushed Population.io with one tweet, how they published 74 books of pool images totaling about 6000 pages, and how they outsourced some of the work to an Indian company to trace the pools. Amazing stuff! Enjoy it! LINKS Generative Design – Benedikt’s book on generative design RCA Design Interactions The Big Atlas of LA Pools Aerial Bold Kickstarter Page Letter Hunt for Aerial Bold – help Benedikt and his team find letters! Population.io Foldit – Science Gamification Tool Related episodes Polygraph and The Journalist Engineer Matt Daniels

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Tableau. You can download a free trial at http://tableau.com/datastories. Hey yo, we have Jen Christiansen from Scientific American with us in DS#52. Jen is art director of information graphics at Scientific American magazine where she is been for about then years and she has a background in natural science illustration from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Science communication is one of our favorite topics and we are so happy to have such an amazing expert like Jen on the show. Jen reveals the nitty gritty of scientific visualization and illustration as experienced by one of the top scientific communication magazines in the world. “How does a scientific piece come to life? Where does an idea for a new piece come from? How do they interact with the scientists to make sure everything they report is accurate and yet accessible for a broad audience? And what does need to be done before an illustration gets ready for print?” We discuss this and many other questions with Jen. Enjoy the show! LINKS Jen Christiansen’s home page http://jenchristiansen.com Scientific American: http://scientificamerican.com A Look under the Hood of Online Data Visualization (collection of SciAm graphics from the past) Where the Wild Bees Are: Documenting a Loss of Native Bee Species between the 1800s and 2010s (Piece on Bees done with Moritz) (project’s page from Moritz) Jan Willem Tulp’s The Flavor Connection (on food pairings theory) – and original scientific article and graphics from Barabási’s lab (pdf) Pop Culture Pulsar: Origin Story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Cover (artists using scientists’ images – transcending the context of a visualization) Related episodes Kim Albrecht on Untangling Tennis and the Cosmic WebInformation+ Conference ReviewVisualization and Statistics with Andrew Gelman and Jessica Hullman

We are now sponsored by Qlik. You can download it for free here. Hi Folks! We have another great guest on the show. Dietmar Offenhuber visits us to talk about smart cities and visualizing data coming from cities. Dietmar has an interesting background. He has a background in architecture with a Dipl. Ing. from the Technical University Vienna and then he got a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab and a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT. He’s also been a key researcher at Ars Electronica Futurelab. Now he is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Art + Design and Public Policy, where he does research on the technological and social aspects of smart cities and urban governance. In the show we talk about many of his super interesting projects such as Wegzeit  (timespace visualizations of LA) and Trash Track (on tracking and visualizing where garbage goes), and interesting concepts such as Accountability Technologies and Infrastructure Legibility. We also talk about the future of smart cities and what we should expect to get our of smart cities. Enjoy the show! LINKS (Moritz Launched ON BROADWAY with Lev Manovich, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer) Our Guest: Dietmar Offenhuber Arts Electronica Future Lab MIT Senseable City Lab Northeastern University Department of Art + Design Wegzeit – timespace visualizations of LA Comment Flow (social media visualization) Semaspace (graph editing tool) Trash Track (tracking and visualizing trash) Smartcitizen (distributed crowdsourced sensors) Bill Mitchell (MIT Media Lab Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences) Mapping the archive (project with Dietmar and Moritz on the Arts Electronica Archive) Dietmar’s Interview: Sorting Out Cities Deitmar’s Book: Inscribing A Square (how urban data shapes public space / discourse, and what kinds of representations are involved, and what is their function) Dietmar’s Book: Accountability Technologies – Tools for Asking Hard Questions Dietmar’s Book: Decoding The City