Data Stories

Hey yo! We are back! We have a very researchy kind of episode this time. Jessica Hullman is on the show to talk about her research on narrative visualization. Jessica is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley and soon to be Assistant Professor at University of Washington iSchool. In the show we talk about lots of interesting basic visualization research issues like visualization literacy, bias and saliency, uncertainty, and some interesting automated annotation systems that Jessica has developed. We also talk about Jessica’s background in experimental poetry! Have fun. — Links School of poetic computation Rudolf Arnheim (Art and Visual Perception) Zacks and Tversky’s study on line charts and bar charts interpretation Jessica’s paper on the role of sequence in vis (potential for order effects): Jessica’s paper on Benefitting InfoVis with Visual Difficulties Stephen Few’s criticism of the paper Paper on “What makes a data visualization memorable?” Paper on how perceptually difficult stimuli help us think more analytically Paper on “Animation: Can It Facilitate?” (criticising the value of animation) Having to explain things to yourself is useful for learning (from graphs) (in general) Enrico’s paper on “The Persuasive Power of Visualization” Kahneman’s book “Thinking fast and slow” Paper on graphs making information more visually salient NYT graphics: FIFA worldcup draws (representing uncertainty) Economist’s Blog Graphic Detail Contextifier and NewsViews (Jessica’s systems for generating visualizations to go with news articles) Ellipsis and Lyra (Authoring systems for narrative visualizations from Arvind Satyanarayan and Jeff Heer) Tableau Story Points

Hi there! We have been chasing Paolo for a while and eventually we managed to have him on the show. Paolo is Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano and he is the founder of Density Design, a lab with an interesting mix of research, design and visualization. With Paolo we talk about all things at the intersection of design and visualization, including a very interesting digression on architecture and how it helped him in the development of the lab. We also talk about how to teach design and the role of Visualization in the Humanities. We also talk about Raw, an online visualization tool they developed which has recently gained quite some popularity (if you don’t know it you should try it). Enjoy the show! — Links Cyber-Geography Maps (early inspiration) Density Design Flicker Stream Density Design Blog 99 Models of Design Processes Mapping the Republic of Letters (and this: http://athanasius.stanford.edu/) Franco Moretti’s Distant Readings and Giorgio Caviglia (and the “incorporation” of design into humanities) Fineo (Sankey Diagrams Tool)

Hi all, Finally, after chasing him for a long while we have Manuel Lima on the show! Manuel has been around for a very long time. He created Visual Complexity in 2005, an archive of network visualizations which became very popular. He is also the author of two great books: Visual Complexity and The Book of Trees. In the show we talk about archiving visualizations, how to write and publish visualization books and how the whole field had developed and where it is heading. Great great show! Take care. Links Manuel’s master thesis at Parson’s: BlogViz Visual Complexity (Book) Visual Complexity (Website) The Book of Trees Information Visualization Manifesto (check the comments section!) Manuel’s Current Employer: Code Academy Infosthetics Blog Barabasi’s Linked: http://barabasilab.com/LinkedBook/ Johnson’s Emergence Visual Simplexity (Book) The Allosphere Display And once again, thanks to our audio editor Nathan Griffiths (twitter.com/njgriffiths) for taking care of this episode!

That’s a particularly tough but juicy episode folks! We turn a little bit inward and talk about the many challenges of teaching visualization. We have code artist Scott Murray on the show, the author of the lovely D3 book “Interactive Data Visualization for the Web” and our almost-cohost ever-present Andy Kirk with us from visualisingdata.com. Scott teaches visualization courses at Department of Art and Architecture University of San Francisco and Andy teaches some very popular 1-day workshop courses all around the world. We talk about our experience with teaching visualization, reporting about what seems to work and what does not. I think we mostly report about our constant struggle to make things work Hopefully this is going to be of help and fun for you guys! And once again, thanks to our audio editor Nathan Griffiths (twitter.com/njgriffiths) for taking care of this episode! Links Santiago Ortiz’s: 45 ways to communicate two quantities John Swabisch’s HelpMeViz (to teach by good/bad examples) Scott’s Easy as Pi

Hey yo … super cool guest today on Data Stories. We have data artist Jer Thorp for a whole episode on Data Art and Visualization. We managed to catch him before he leaves for a deep dive in a submarine next week. Jer is former artist in residence at New York Times R&D Labs and now he is the co-founder of the Office For Creative Research, a studio/lab that mixes science and art. Among many other things he is the creator of the algorithm and software tool “to aid in the placement of the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan” and Cascade, a tool to visualize “the sharing activity of New York Times content over social networks.” In this episode we talk about his past and new projects, teaching art and vis and the many intersections between art and science. [Big thanks to Nathan Griffiths for audio-editing the episode!] Links The IEEE VIS’14 Art Program (that’s going to be in Paris) NYU ITP Data Art Course Cascade (vis of NYT sharing activity) Shakespeare Machine (earstudio | video on vimeo) Jer’s HBR article on “Visualization as Process, Not Output“ Collection of vis development process images from OCR Example of Data Performance: Thousands of Exhausted Things (OCResearch and The Elevator Repair Service) Hans Rosling’s TED Talk “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen“ Eyeo Festival Related episodes Data Art and Visual Programming with Marcin Ignac from Variable

Hi all, Hot topic today! We invited Alberto Cairo and Robert Kosara to discuss the role of storytelling in visualization.  What is storytelling? Is all visualization storytelling? Should we always strive for telling a story? How does storytelling match with exploratory visualization? Should we aim more for worlds and macroscopes than stories as Moritz advocated a while back at Visualized? We went on a somewhat lengthy discussion on these topics and I think we all ended up agreeing on a lot of things and developed a much more nuanced view of storytelling. As you can see from the picture we had lots of fun (thanks Robert for taking the screenshot). Fantastic chat! Note: Alberto had a lot more to say after the episode so he decided to publish a follow up post that clarifies some of the things he said on the show. But — spoiler alert — listen to the episode first! P.S. Big, big thanks to Fabricio Tavares for taking care of the audio editing of this episode! — Links Lynn Cherny on Implied Stories (and Data Vis) Periscopic’s Dino Citraro on A Framework for Talking About Data Narration Book cited by Alberto: The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Great visualizations without stories (proposed by Moritz): Aron Koblin’s Flight Patterns Martin Wattenberg’s Map of the Market Moritz position on stories: Look ma, no story! | Worlds, not stories Enrico’s position on stories: Telling a story doesn’t tell the whole story Robert series on storytelling: Stories Are Gateways Into Worlds | Story: A Definition Robert’s mention of visualization on Copenhagen: Emissions, Treaties and Impacts Jessica Hallman’s VIS’13 paper on: Deeper Understanding of Sequence in Visualization

[Thanks to our audio editor Nathan Griffiths (twitter.com/njgriffiths) for taking care of this episode] Hi everyone! After a long while … we have a real British voice on the show again! In this episode we have the pleasure to host data journalist Simon Rogers. Simon has been leading data journalism initiatives at The Guardian for many years and he recently moved to Twitter (with the official role of Data Editor) where he takes care of creating visual stories out of Twitter data. In the show we talk about his past experience at The Guardian as well as the more recent and exciting developments at Twitter. Links The debate of Gregor & Moritz with Simon on colors (and Simon pissed off by it :)) Creative tools: CartoDB and DataWrapper‎ Twitter Data Blog (where new projects are announced) Overview page of Twitter visualizations Simon’s post: Data Journalism as Punk [very interesting concept!] Simon’s infographics kid books: Animal Kingdom and Human Body  

Hi Everyone! We have Jon Schwabish on the show in this episode. Jon is an economist who specializes in data visualization for politics and economics. You can see some of his work in the blog he writes called Policyviz. We invited him to talk about his recent new initiative called HelpMeViz, a web site where people can send requests to visualize some data of interest or redesign some particularly tricky charts. The web site quickly gained some momentum and already publishes quite a nice set of charts, suggested redesigns, and most of all very insightful discussions (it’s not just the usual I like this, I like that). There is a lot to learn there. In the interview we talk about how HelpMeViz was born, how it works, what kind of entries they have been published so far and how it’s going to evolve. Give a look to HelpMeViz and submit your own charts and data there! Links How HelpMeViz works … Jon’s “An Economist’s Guide to Visualizing Data” (full of very nice examples of chart redesign) Interesting discussions from HelpMeViz: Budget Pie Chart Triplet State Migration Flows Debate About Colors — And here’s another piece of great news: For the first time, this episode was audio edited and annotated by a volunteer helper – woo! Fabricio Tavares was kind to help us. Thanks a million! The equation is simple: less audio editing work for Moritz means more episodes we can do in a year. Get in touch in case you would like help us, too!

Hi folks, We have Giorgia Lupi from Accurat on the show with us this time in our first real face-to-face episode ever — yes Moritz and Enrico in the same room! Giorgia’s work, and generally the work done by her agency, has been super popular lately. You might have seen, for instance, their work visualizing Nobel Prizes or visualizing painters’ lives. Giorgia kindly hosted us in the Accurat’s studio in New York where we had a nice chat on hand-crafted visualization, high-density designs, design studios, and much much more. Here is us arguing even before starting the recording   Enjoy the show! — Links Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized Accurat’s Flickr data stream Accurat’s fashion analytics tool Giorgia’s sketches on Pinterest Research paper on the benefit of visual difficulties: “Hullman, Jessica, Eytan Adar, and Priti Shah. “Benefitting InfoVis with visual difficulties.” Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on 17.12 (2011): 2213-2222.”

Happy 2014! Here we go folks. Another year has passed. We review what was big and major trends in 2013 and what to expect in 2014. We have two old DS friends on the show to help us with the review: Andy “Visualisingdata” Kirk and Robert “Eagereyes” Kosara. Important announcement: in 2014 we want to hear more from you! Please feel free to contact us to ask questions, we will address them in our upcoming podcasts. You can also suggest new guests or topics you would like us to cover. You can reach us through: Twitter (@datastories) | Facebook | Email: mail@datastori.es. We are looking forward to hearing from you! Take care. — Links Periscopic’s U.S. Gun Deaths Pitch Interactive’s Drones NYT’s Silkroad and Snowfall Wealth Inequality Video Interactive Things’ NZZ Swiss Maps Sketchy Rendering for InfoVis Age of Buildings (pointillistic cartography) Nanocubes: Fast Visualization of Large Spatiotemporal Datasets Washington Post’s Shots heard around the District Density Design’s RAW Visualization Tool New Blogs: http://wtfviz.net/ | http://helpmeviz.com/ | http://thumbsupviz.com/ Book: Design for Information (Robert’s Review) Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight and the Vis Job Opening Tableau Story Points Infoactive – Kickstarter Vis Tool Project