Data Stories

Hi there, We have Marian Dörk on the show today to talk about the “Information Flaneur”: an approach to data visualization centered on navigating, exploring, browsing and observing data with curiosity to learn about what’s there, and to see and be surprised by new thoughts and discoveries. Marian is Research Professor at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam near Berlin where he works on “exploring novel uses of interactive visualizations to support a wide range of information practices.” We talk about many interesting new directions for visualization like visualizing data starting from a few seed points, whether we always need an overview first in visualization, and tips on how to design visualization for “information flaneurs.” Enjoy the show! — Links Marian’s Patina Project Marian’s Information Flaneur Paper Marian’s Pivot Paths Shneiderman’s Overview first, filter and zoom, and details on demand Lev Manovich work on Cultural Analytics Pirolli and Card’s Information Scent Theory Monadic exploration / Beautiful trouble Enrico’s Paper on Egocentric Biochemistry Visualization Van Ham and Perer’s Paper: “Search, show context, expand later” Mitchell Whitelaw’s Generous interfaces Marian’s Edge Maps

Hi Everyone, We have a super guest this time on the show! Ben Shneiderman joins us to talk about his new treemap art project (beautiful treemap prints you can hang on the wall), treemaps and their history, and information visualization in general. Needless to say, we had a wonderful time chatting with him: lots of history and very inspiring thoughts (tip: we should look at vis 50-100 years from now!) Take care. — Links Software Psychology (early book from Ben Shneiderman) A short history of structured flowcharts (Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams) (funny story of how this was badly rejected as a paper) Treemap History (from Ben Shneiderman’s web page) Tremap Art Project (new Ben Shneiderman’s art project) (you can download your own prints!) Papers Bruls, Mark, Kees Huizing, and Jarke J. Van Wijk. “Squarified treemaps.” Data Visualization 2000. Springer Vienna, 2000. 33-42. [First algorithm taking care of aspect ratio] Bederson, Benjamin B., Ben Shneiderman, and Martin Wattenberg. “Ordered and quantum treemaps: Making effective use of 2D space to display hierarchies.” AcM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 21.4 (2002): 833-854. [paper with extensive evaluation of alternative treemap layouts] Ahlberg, Christopher, Christopher Williamson, and Ben Shneiderman. “Dynamic queries for information exploration: An implementation and evaluation.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 1992.

Hi Folks! We did it again: we have a special episode directly from IEEE VIS’13 (the premier academic conference on visualization). Enrico caught Robert Kosara and recorded almost one hour of highlights from the conference. And there is a final message for Moritz too! Don’t miss it. Take care. — Links (some of the papers mentioned): Chart Memorability Sketchy Story (freeform data visualization) Understanding Sequence in Narrative Visualization Nanocubes (large-scale visualization on the web) Visual Sedimentation (handling dynamic/streaming data) Robert’s Conference Report on Eagereyes IEEE (VisWeek) VIS Papers on the Web (collection of papers accessible on the web) Related episodes Highlights from IEEE VIS'22 with Tamara Munzner

Here we go with another great episode. This time more on the data side. We have Kate Crawford, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, on the show talking about the other face of big data. That is, after all the excitement, hype, and buzz, she is the one who is asking the tough questions: Is more data always better? Is there any objective truth in it? Is big data really making us smarter? Papers and articles from Kate Boyd, D. and Crawford, K. 2012 ‘Critical Questions for Big Data‘, Information, Communication and Society, Volume 15, no 5, pp 662-679. Crawford, K. and Schultz, J. 2014 ‘Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms‘, Boston College Law Review, Vol. 55, No. 1. “The Hidden Biases in Big Data” (Harvard Business Review) “Think Again: Big Data” (Foreign Policy) Some of Kate’s Talks The Raw and the Cooked: The Mythologies of Big Data Strata 2013: Kate Crawford, “Algorithmic Illusions: Hidden Biases of Big Data“ Links Book: Objectivity by Lorraine J. Daston (How recent is it?) Paper: Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior (how big data and algorithms can discriminate). Paper: Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility (only 4 data points are needed to identify a person) When Google got flu wrong (Google failing to predict flu) The End of Theory: “The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete” (Chris Anderson on the end of theory, correlation vs. causation, etc.) How a Map Is Like an Op-Ed (“Maps are arguments, just like a piece of written journalism is an argument.”) Mislove, Alan, et al. “Understanding the Demographics of Twitter Users.” ICWSM. 2011. — Enjoy it, there’s lots of food for thoughts here! Related episodes Data Ethics and Privacy with Eleanor SaittaCalling Bullshit with Carl Bergstrom and Jevin WestVisualization and Statistics with Andrew Gelman and Jessica Hullman

Hi Folks! We are back after a relaxing summer with a brand new episode! We have Petra Isenberg, from the Aviz team at INRIA (we’ve had other guests from the same lab in the past) to talk about visualization on non-standard devices and environments. Yes, stuff like display walls, surfaces, tabletops, and people collaborating around them. It feels like the future is here and there’s a ton of potentially interesting applications for visualization! Petra gives us hints about what works and what does not work, what the research says, what has been tried already, and what needs to be explored, etc. She also gives practical recommendations at the end about how to start doing visualization on these devices. Really cool stuff! Take care, Enrico & Mo. — Chapters 00:00 Back from summer break 02:41 Our guest today: Petra Isenberg 05:59 Moving beyond the desktop 11:55 New challenges in collaborative settings 22:25 Interactions with very large screens 38:14 Practical use and how to get started 48:53 More resources — Links and papers: Petra’s Web Site: http://petra.isenberg.cc/ Surface work from Moritz http://mace-project.eu/maeve/ http://max-planck-research-networks.net Statusboard Bezerianos, Anastasia, and Petra Isenberg. “Perception of visual variables on tiled wall-sized displays for information visualization applications.“Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on 18.12 (2012): 2516-2525. Scott, Stacey D., et al. “Territoriality in collaborative tabletop workspaces.” Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 2004. APA Resource list from Petra Research links: Papercollection: Literature review including papers at the intersection of visualization+interactive surfaces (research article to appear) Book: Tabletops – Horizontal Interactive Surfaces Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Technology links: Interactive Multimedia Technology (blog by lynnmarentette) Multitouch google group (managed by Johannes Schöning), email Johannes to be added to the mailing list Software frameworks/libraries for developing vis on surfaces: Most Pixels Ever (Processing for very large wall displays – I forgot to mention this one during the podcast) kivy (Python framework for developing multi-touch applications) libavg (maintained by Ulrich von Zadow who has worked on several visualization + interactive surface installations) ZVTM (Java toolkit for developing ZUIs, includes possibilities to run visualizations on a cluster) Microsoft Surface SDK (for mobile check out iOS and Android SDKs)

Hi Everyone, In this episode we talk about visualization on mobile and touch devices. How do you design visualization interfaces for these kinds of devices? How different is it to interact with your fingertips rather than with your mouse? Advantages, disadvantages, unexplored opportunities? We discuss with Dominukus Baur, interaction designer and mobile data visualization specialist. You can see his work on his website/blog. Make sure to give a look to his talk at the OpenVis Conference: Data on Your FingerTips. He gives lots of useful tips! Episode Chapters 00:00:00 Enrico and Mo go on vacations 00:02:28 Our guest: Dominikus Baur 00:04:06 Life logging and personal media 00:05:10 Accents 00:05:39 Why mobile visualization, and how is it different from desktop visualizations? 00:09:24 Mobile interaction 00:13:27 Mobiles for interaction with other displays 00:14:38 Augmented reality 00:15:54 TouchWave – touch interaction with stacked graphs 00:21:52 Multitouch 00:24:45 Analytical, advanced visualization on mobile? 00:26:44 Self-tracking and life logging 00:31:17 Daytum app 00:32:54 Other good mobile visualization apps 00:35:12 Second screen apps 00:36:28 Moritz wants an atlas 00:37:04 The age of ghettoblasters 00:38:00 Use mobiles to interact with large screens 00:41:48 Technology: native, or web-based? 00:46:07 Better Life Index: HTML5 port works on mobiles, tablets 00:48:00 Research on mobile and touch interactions 00:50:39 Large screens 00:58:54 How to get started 01:01:13 Dominikus will start a blog!! Links Dominikus’ TouchWave (rich interaction with stackgraphs) Daytum iPhone App (from Nicholas Feltron for self-logging) Business Intelligence iPad Apps Roambi (http://www.roambi.com/) MicroStrategy Mobile (http://www.microstrategy.com/mobile/business-intelligence) PUSHBI (http://pushbi.com/) Perspective (http://pixxa.com/) etc etc Presentation Apps HaikuDeck (http://www.haikudeck.com/) Apple Keynote (http://www.apple.com/apps/iwork/keynote/) Research TouchViz: A Case Study Comparing Two Interfaces for Data Analytics on Tablets Visualizing Information on Mobile Devices Querying and Visualizing Information Spaces on Personal Digital Assistants Getting Practical with Interactive Tabletop Displays: Designing for Dense Data, Fat Fingers, Diverse Interactions, and Face-to-Face Collaboration Lark: Coordinating Co-located Collaboration with Information Visualization Tangible Views for Information Visualization      

Hi Everyone, In this episode we talk about the VAST Challenge, a visual analytics contest organized every year. The VAST Challenge is co-located with the IEEE VIS Conference, the premier venue for academic work in visualization. The VAST Challenge has many unique features (like the generation of synthetic data sets with injected ground truth) and this year for the first time it features a predictive analytics and design mini-challenge. (Stephen Few has also discussed this too here.) You should definitely check it out. We talk with Prof. Georges Grinstein from UMass Lowell and Celste Paul from NSA. They give us lots of details about how the data is generated, how the entries are evaluated and how it looks like participating to the contest. You guys should actually give it a try and rock it! — [Sorry no episode chapters this time] Links KDD Cup: main contest in data mining TREC: main contest in text retrieval Benchmark data sets from InfoVis Contest Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository (all past VAST Challenge editions) Sumedicina: telling fictional stories with charts (see explanation here) Papers Plaisant, Catherine, J-D. Fekete, and Georges Grinstein. Promoting insight-based evaluation of visualizations: From contest to benchmark repository. Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on 14.1 (2008): 120-134. Pascale Proulx and Casey Canfield. The beneficial role of the VAST Challenges in the evolution of GeoTime and nSpace2. Information Visualization. May 10, 2013 preprint Christian Rohrdantz, Florian Mansmann, Chris North, and Daniel A Keim. Augmenting the educational curriculum with the Visual Analytics Science and Technology Challenge: Opportunities and pitfalls. Information Visualization. April 11, 2013 preprint Jean Scholtz, Catherine Plaisant, Mark Whiting, and Georges Grinstein. Evaluation of visual analytics environments: The road to the Visual Analytics Science and Technology challenge evaluation methodology. Information Visualization. June 11, 2013 preprint Costello, Loura, et al. Advancing user-centered evaluation of visual analytic environments through contests. Information Visualization 8.3 (2009): 230-238.

Hi Folks! In this episode we touch upon a tricky question: where is the fine line between taking inspiration from other projects and merely copying them? We discuss with Bryan Connor from The Why Axis and Mahir Yavuz from Seed Scientific. Note: We suggest you give a look to the links below (under the heading “Cases We Discuss in the Podcast”) before listening to the podcast, most of the episode is centered around these examples we selected for discussion. — Episode Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:56 Flattr 00:03:46 Main topic today: inspiration or plagiarism with our guests Mahir M. Yavuz and Bryan Connor 00:07:53 Is data visualization turning into a copycat scene? 00:08:32 Remake of subway map by New Yorker 00:13:19 Patterns 00:14:03 Idea – technology – aesthetics 00:16:06 Patterns ctd. 00:18:19 Gun murders – drone strikes – meteorites 00:23:19 What constitutes an “outrageous rip-off”? 00:27:31 On originality 00:33:07 Guardian Gay Rights / Gun Laws graphic 00:37:53 On the value of reproduction and chains of inspiration 00:44:01 Stream graphs 00:49:01 Value of transparent documentation of process 00:50:44 Non-patterns 00:53:13 Remix culture, github culture 00:54:48 Snow fall 00:58:04 Patents 01:01:47 A new language for citation in design? 01:09:36 Closing remarks — Cases We Discuss in the Podcast New Yorker’s Inequality Subway Map Inequality  and New York’s Subway (the original) Inequality & Mass Transit in the Bay Area No Fare Hikes Periscopic’s Dramatic Animation of Gun Murders U.S. Gun Deaths (the original) Out of Sight, Out of Mind (drones) Bolides (meteorites) Guardian’s Gay Rights Radial Visualization Gay rights in the US, state by state (the original) States Take Action on Gun Control Gun control in America: A state-by-state breakdown Streamgraphs The Original ThemeRiver (developed at PNNL) (the original) Lee Byron’s Streamgraph The Histomap (Four Thousand Years Of World History) More Examples (not discussed) Empires: History’s Largest Empires / Empires Strike Again Spotlight Metaphor: Spotlight of Profitability / Health Care Spending in Selected Countries Pay Gap Scatter Plot: Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller? / Pay Gap Between Women and Men Good Related Reads The Remixing Dilemma: The Trade-off Between Generativity and Originality Andy Kirk’s The fine line between plagiarism and inspiration Links Andrew Gelman’s criticism of gun control radial plot Snow Fail: The New York Times And Its Misunderstanding Of Copyright Ben Shneiderman et al.’s Innovation Trajectories for Information Visualizations: Comparing Treemaps, Cone Trees, and Hyperbolic Trees (on the commercial success/failure of some visualization techniques) Stephen Few’s Bullet Graph Edward Tufte’s Sparklines — Thanks a lot to Bryan and Mahir for this intense, controversial and funny chat! Take care, Enrico and Moritz. Related episodes The Hustle with Mahir Yavuz and Jan Willem Tulp

Hi everyone, We have graphic editors Mike Bostock and Shan Carter in this dense and long episode. It’s great to finally have someone from the New York Times! We talk about many practical and more philosophical aspects of publishing interactive visualizations on the web. We also spend quite some time discussing the past, present and future of D3.js. (On a side note: apologies for starting a bit abruptly and for the weird noises. Enrico was desperately and unsuccessfully trying to find a quiet and calm spot at the CHI conference.) Take Care, Enrico & Mo. P.S. Many thanks to all of you guys who sent us Twitter questions for Mike and Shan. — Episode Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:12 Our guests today: New York Times graphics editors Mike Bostocks and Shan Carter 00:01:54 About the NYT graphics department 00:06:56 Map wrangling 00:08:47 QA, evaluation, fact checking,… 00:11:23 Twitter question: Post the data set along with the graphic? 00:15:51 Exploratory or explanatory? 00:19:56 User tracking, user feedback 00:25:53 Balance of familiarity vs. new visual vocabularies 00:29:52 Workflow, on the example of the 512 paths graphic 00:38:05 Hybrid workflows between automation and manual layout 00:45:12 d3 00:45:49 History and philosophy 00:56:19 Value of examples 00:57:31 Community adoption 00:59:25 Vega 01:04:53 More d3 books or tutorials for advanced users? 01:08:15 Developer community 01:09:45 Sustainability 01:11:51 Future development 01:15:10 Enrico is back! 01:16:13 Is d3 complete? 01:18:52 When does Mike sleep? 01:19:45 Wrapping it up Links to discussed NYT projects 512 Paths to the White House / Shan’s talk on the making of 512 paths Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted China Still Dominates, but Some Manufacturers Look Elsewhere Among the Oscar Contenders, a Host of Connections Ralf Straumann on hexagonal cartograms   Related episodes Xenographics with Maarten Lambrechtssvelte.js for web-based dataviz with Amelia Wattenberger

Hi all, We have two fantastic guests to talk about using visualization for the good. We actually decided to make it even bigger and provokingly titled it: can visualization save the world? We have on stage: Kim Rees co-founder of Periscopic, a data visualization company guided by the motto: “do good with data,” and Jake Porway, founder of Data Kind, an organization that brings together data scientists and social organizations. We discuss the challenges of working in this world of big data opportunities and the risks and potentially negative implications of using big data. Chapters 00:00:00 Intro, welcome to our guests Kim Rees (Periscopic) and Jake Porway (Datakind) 00:01:39 Can data visualization save the world? 00:04:44 Periscopic 00:05:38 Jake & Datakind 00:09:32 Visualization as a process 00:15:17 How do you pick projects to work on? 00:18:01 Periscopic’s U.S. gun deaths visualization 00:30:08 Awareness alone does not help – how you get people to action? 00:32:57 On process 00:40:12 Multiple truths in same data 00:42:53 Responsible authorship 00:45:19 Parallels between data visualization and “photo journalism”? 00:46:12 Responsible data and visualization authorship ctd. 00:50:03 Project votesmart 00:51:39 NYT graphics jobs report 00:53:15 Success stories? 01:05:33 Refuse to work for potentially unethic clients? 01:08:28 “The dark side of datakind” 01:09:06 Back to original question 01:13:18 Concerns in visualizing personal stories 01:24:59 Wrapping it up Links Periscopic’s Gun Murders Visualization Jake’s article: “You Can’t Just Hack Your Way to Social Change” Jer Thorp’s Visualization as Process Article Book: Raw Data Is An Oxymoron The Stop, Question and Frisk Data Biases in creating data Project Votesmart NYT vis of job market interpretation Map of gun owners   Related episodes Data Visualization at Capital One with Kim Rees and Steph Hay