Data Stories

Hi Everyone, It’s been a long time since our last episode. Sorry, sorry, sorry! Moritz was/is busy with Emoto and the London Olympics, Enrico is moving (with the whole family) to New York City. In this episode we have the honor to talk with “data illustrator” Stefanie Posavec. Stefanie makes fascinating hand-crafted visualization like Literary Organism and (En)tangled Word Bank. Most of her work is done by hand, like the highlighted text of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, and this is so intriguing that we wanted to know more about this process. You can also see her recent Eyeo Festival 2012 talk to know more about how she works. There’s a lot of food for thoughts in this episode and, sure enough, lots of fun! Here is the breakdown: 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:53 Olympic Effects – the emoto project (http://emoto2012.org) 00:04:42 Enrico will move to NYC! 00:07:08 Special guest today: Stefanie Posavec 00:09:05 Literary Organism 00:11:25 Hand-made! (art/design/craft?) 00:14:36 Data Illustration 00:19:12 Critique of data visualization, and the right framing of your work 00:26:43 Tips for novices 00:32:08 Manual effort creates “weight”? 00:35:35 Work process – Measuring Kraftwerk and other projects 00:45:27 Data analysis aspects 00:47:50 Code vs manual layout – should Stef learn to code? 00:55:40 More hand made data illustration projects 00:58:10 Data cuisine workshop 00:59:01 Skype problems 01:00:13 Prints! Have fun! Enrico & Mo. Related episodes FT Data Crunch with Federica Cocco and John Burn-Murdoch

Hi there! In this episode we talk about bridging academia and industry. We touched upon this issue many times in the past so we decided to record a whole a special issue on that. To help us with it we invited Danyel Fisher, a renown Information Visualization researcher from Microsoft Research. This year Danyel is chairing the newly established Industry Track at VisWeek 2012, the leading conference in Visualization, and his job is to attract more people from industry to this traditionally pretty academic conference. We discuss existing practices, gaps, and ways to bridge them. Here is the breakdown of the episode: [00:00:00] Our special guest today: Danyel Fisher [00:04:00] Relations between research and project departments at Microsoft [00:12:39] Existing gaps between between research and practitioners [00:16:09] Transfer of algorithms, e.g. Voronoi treemaps [00:18:40] Visweek industry track [00:32:03] Affordability of big conferences for individuals, lowering the threshold [00:38:20] Live transmission from visweek? [00:39:21] How can non-academic conferences attract more researchers? [00:43:09] Researchers and their presence on the web [00:50:30] Are papers an adequate publication format for visualization research? [00:52:39] What else can we do? [00:54:27] How to get designers to read papers [00:59:28] Text books: Colin Ware, Tufte, Beautiful Visualization [01:05:52] Danyel’s current research: Interaction with Big Data [01:12:12] Final pleading for visweek and potentially exciting encounters with Moritz in an elevator Have fun! Related episodes The Hustle with Mahir Yavuz and Jan Willem Tulp

Hi Folks, We are raising the bar here! In this new episode we have Jeff Heer, Assistant Professor at Stanford and creator of 4 (!) data visualization toolkits/languages (Prefuse, Flare, Protovis, D3). Jeff is a very well regarded researcher in the area of visualization, user interfaces and human-computer interaction. If you don’t know him yet we strongly encourage you to give a look to his projects web page, you’ll find lots of cool stuff there like his studies on Graphical Perception and Wrangler, a data pre-processing tool. Talking with Jeff has been great and very inspiring. We talk about past, present and future of visualization; everything dressed with LOLs, a bit of gossip and … one scoop at the end of the podcast! Have fun, Enrico & Mo Episode Chapters [00:00:00] Introduction: Today’s special guest – Jeff Heer [00:03:12] Investigating complete data interaction flows, and how visualization can help [00:06:47] Data wrangling [00:09:50] Prefuse, flare, protovis, d3 [00:10:44] prefuse [00:14:52] flare [00:17:05] protovis [00:22:17] d3 [00:28:52] Comparing the different paradigms [00:35:06] What’s next? [00:38:33] Flexible tools for data exploration [00:41:42] How to bridge research and practice? [00:49:44] Function vs. aesthetics? [00:53:33] Is there a future for high-end customized visualization? [00:56:02] Why is visualization so popular right now? [01:01:18] The future of visualization [01:14:06] Super secret start-up in formation!

Folks, Here is another great episode … honestly I think it’s one of the best we have ever recorded (-Enrico). We talk about color, and color – you know … it’s huge. To get some help we invited Gregor Aisch from Driven By Data and asked him to talk about his experience with color and his super useful library chroma.js. We have to apologize for a number of things. The episode came out late, the quality is not super high and we have no transcribed chapters this time. No worries, this won’t happen again (or too often) and we have no intention to neglect DS. Moritz has been traveling and taking days off in beautiful Greece and Enrico was just having another baby. Update: Useful color tools suggested by some of you http://www.colourlovers.com/ http://kuler.adobe.com/ (love this!) http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ColorTool.php Update: Here is the chapter list! We just could not let such a great episode go without proper chapter marks… [00:00] Intro: Today with Gregor Aisch from http://driven-by-data.net [02:04] Computational Visualistics [03:32] Today’s topic: Color [03:46] Family drama interlude [04:08] Colors: Powerful, but tricky to get right [04:50] Color perception [09:55] Color spaces [15:39] Colors for categorical data [17:20] What’s the maximum number of categorical colors to be used? [19:40] Equidistance [20:15] Colorbrewer [23:13] chrome.js [25:56] Colors for continuous data [26:41] Mo’s six word advice [27:04] Color for continuous data – usually not advisable [30:14] Rainbow scales [30:48] …and how to avoid them [33:17] Color is difficult [35:07] More tips on how to do it right [37:29] Is there a method behind ugly visualization in science? [38:58] Paper: Evaluation of artery visualizations [42:39] How to deal with skewed distributions [46:19] Learn about the data, highlight the interesting insights [48:12] Redundant encoding and interaction between visual variables [51:13] Use for secondary dimensions, or small number of categories [52:57] Mo’s tips [54:04] Don’t forget the legend [54:34] Gregor’s tips [56:07] Above all, do no harm. [56:43] Enrico’s tips [58:27] Wrapping it up And stay tuned for another episode soon! We will have Jeff Heer on board! If you have any questions for him add a comment below or send us an email (see address in the right). Take care and have fun! Enrico and Moritz. Related episodes Datawrapper with Lisa C. Rost and Gregor Aisch

Hi Folks! In this episode we talk about food. Food? Yes, food. Moritz recently created the Müsli Ingredient Network, a visualization of ingredient combinations in müsli, and we took this as an opportunity to talk about one of our favorite topics other than visualization, that is, food. But hey … there is a lot to visualize about food! Listen to the episode and you’ll see it. Visualizations discussed in detail: Mo’s Müsli Network Mo’s Müsli Matrix Barabasi’s Flavor Network Episode breakdown: [00:00] Intro [02:18] Today’s topic – food! [02:46] Moritz’s Muesli ingredient network [10:13] Barabasi’s food ingredient analysis [16:20] Are scientific papers the best way to communicate research? [18:19] Food pairing website [19:23] Visualizing food 40 ways [21:02] How America spends food and drink spending per city [22:49] Use food to represent data [24:32] Personal data [24:55] Nutrition data [28:26] Self nutrition data [30:25] Maragrida’s email: Data sexuals [31:15] Big data – overrated? [33:09] Hourly webcam shots [34:57] Manually collected data [36:20] Should you learn to code? (Sakshita’s comment) [39:55] Wrapping it up Links and Images: Barabasi’s Food Ingredient Analysis Moritz’s Muesli Network Food Pairing Tool Visualizing Food 40 Ways (the one w/ french fries bar charts :-)) America’s Food and Drink Spending (by Interactive Things) Self Nutrition Data (food database with query visualization tools) USDA National Nutrient Database — As usual your feedback is more than welcome. And let us know if you intend to do some visualization with food data. Have fun!

Hi Folks! We love Andy so much that we decided to keep him with us for another episode (well, actually we hope somebody will eventually pay the ransom). This time we talk about “learning visualization”, which is the perfect topic for him given his experience with his training visualization courses. We received many requests from people who wanted to know how to learn visualization in the past. So, here we are with a more than one hour long podcast with the three of us talking about it. We just hope you’ll find the time to listen to the entire episode. If not, the breakdown below can help you chunking it into a few sessions. Have fun! Breakdown of the episode Introductory thoughts 00:00:00 Intro, Andy Kirk (http://visualisingdata.com) is again our guest 00:01:15 Topic: How to learn visualization 00:01:56 Multidisciplinarity 00:06:31 Reports from teaching practice 00:09:21 Theory and practice – rules vs, free exploration 00:12:24 Do you need to start with a question? Basic skills 00:15:43 What is the basic skill set to learn? 00:16:15 Visual variables 00:18:53 Statistics and data analytics 00:19:32 Gestalt laws 00:20:32 The journalistic sense – what is an interesting angle? 00:22:19 Position is everything 00:23:38 Color is difficult Process and tools 00:25:05 Tools 00:26:18 Data types and repertoire 00:27:15 Metaphors 00:28:52 Interaction 00:31:27 The role of design 00:32:57 How to get started? Learning options and books 00:39:46 Everybody should have a datavis course! 00:41:32 How to learn it yourself? Books, lectures, … 00:42:39 Stephen Few: Show me the numbers 00:43:20 Andy’s first book, and mo is the cinderella of datavis 00:43:52 Readings in Information Visualization: Using vision to think 00:45:09 Edward Tufte: Visual display of quantitative information 00:46:05 Ware: Information Visualization – Perception for Design 00:47:42 Misc. 00:49:23 Our scoop! 00:52:03 Google for “information visualization lecture pdf” The craft of visualization design 00:53:43 Now that you know everything – how to do it in practice? 00:55:01 DIY vs. template-based tools 00:57:01 Do you need to learn how to program? Yes, yep, yes, yeah. Me too. 00:58:36 Tools 01:00:17 Finding data 01:02:28 Put it out there 01:04:08 The pathetic misery that is creating data visualizations Conclusion 01:05:52 Trying to wrap it up 01:07:13 see conference – and see+ 01:08:44 Trying to wrap it up – again! Resources and Links visualisingdata’s resource paper (including books) fellinlovewithdata’s data visualization beginner’s toolkit: books and tools “making a map together“, perfecting a visualization from the guardian’s data blog Ben Shneiderman’s Visual Information Seeking Mantra (overview first, …) Lakoff’s metaphors we live by (if you need metaphors to use in vis) New notable vis books: Noah Illinsky’s Designing Data Visualizations Nathan Yau’s Visualize This Tamara Munzner’s Information Visualization: Principles, Methods, and Practice (early incomplete draft) The Why Axis: vis criticism blog — That’s all folks. Let us know how you like it and feel free to ask more questions if you have.

We have our first guest on the show! Andy Kirk and Moritz just came back from Malofiej 20, the Infographic World Summit, and we used the chance to discuss our impressions of the event — the conference, the awards, the workshops and the general vibe. Breakdown of the episode [00:00:00] Intro and welcome to our guest Andy “Not McCandless” Kirk from visualisingdata.com [00:02:31] Malofiej: what is it, how did we there and some history [00:07:20] Pamplona lifestyle [00:08:42] Stockholm syndrome or best friends forever? [00:10:08] Conference talks in short [00:10:23] Gonzalo Peltzer [00:12:12] Andrew Vande Moere [00:14:02] Moritz Stefaner (slides) [00:16:13] Andy “Big Data” Kirk (slides) [00:23:00] Sheila Pontis [00:25:15] Bryan Christie [00:27:39] Simon Rogers [00:28:47] Robert Kosara [00:30:44] Alberto Cairo [00:31:59] Anne Gerdes, Nora Coenenberg [00:33:42] Nigel Holmes [00:35:20] Matthew Bloch [00:37:15] Ginny Mason [00:39:14] Carl DeTorres [00:41:34] Jaime Serra [00:44:17] Sergio Pecanha [00:45:50] Mario Tascon (@mtascon) [00:46:43] The awards Winner list (pdf) Gold medals with Jury remarks All online winners with links [colorful-data.net] [00:49:49] New York Times dominates [00:51:22] Best of show: Guantanamo Detainees Print piece (and some background info) Online [00:53:49] New York Times again [00:58:17] Internet Group do Brasil [00:58:49] Resumé [01:03:02] What is an information graphic, after all? Images of the Devastation Along Misurata’s Main Road Part Ape, Part Human [01:05:25] We should all submit our online works [01:06:27] We just can’t finish   The jury + speaker crowd More on Malofiej 20 25 lessons learned Bryan Christie’s initial thoughts, and more thoughts Robert Kosara’s perspective  Andy Kirk’s reflections

Hi there, we made it to the third episode (a bit late though, Moritz was travelling to SXSW). In this episode we first answer to some of the questions we received and then we move on to the main topic: how do you evaluate visualization? We have been discussing some contests in episode #2 and thought evaluation is really a key issue there. Breakdown of the episode [00:00] Intro [01:34] Listener question: Terms and conditions in competitions [03:46] Listener question: Connect research and practitioners [07:43] Listener question: How to stay objective about your own work? [10:23] Listener question: Do we criticize each other? [11:15] Listener question: How to introduce business people to benefits of visualization beyond Excel? [13:58] News: Visualizing sprint [15:54] News: Kartograph [19:40] SxSW Panel: Intent and Impact: How Visualization Makes a Change [21:36] Quality criteria and evaluating information visualizations: traditional academic approach [28:08] Evaluation beyond simple, clear-cut tasks [33:13] Enrico admits his secret love of David MacCandless [33:58] Andrew Vande Moere and Helen Purchase: On the role of design in information visualization [35:00] Truth and Beauty or: “I know it when I see it” [38:36] Data politics and importance of how the end product came about [40:36] Tamara Munzner’s nested model for visualization evaluation and design [44:25] Code of ethics [45:59] Wrap up and outlook Links and images SxSW Visualizing.org sprint Kartograph SxSW panel: Intent and Impact Force-Directed Edge Bundling for Graph Visualization Hippocratic Oath (see towards the end of the post) A Code of Ethics for Data Visualization Professionals Research papers mentioned in the episode On the role of design in information visualization. Andrew Vande Moere and Helen Purchase. An Insight-Based Methodology for Evaluating Bioinformatics Visualizations. Purvi Saraiya, Chris North, and Karen Duca. A nested process model for visualization design and validation. Tamara Munzner. — Have fun and, as usual, let us know what you think!

Hi Folks, the second episode is out! First and foremost: thanks a lot for your kind and useful feedback! It’s fantastic to know you are there listening to us. In a way, it’s magic. A big thank also to to David Schroeder of pilotvibe.com for creating a jingle for Data Stories. Yes, we have a jingle now! — In this episode we talk mainly about contest, awards, marathons, etc. (but don’t miss Mo’s rant at the end :-)). Here is the episode chapters breakdown: [00:27] Recent activities [01:56] Feedback for first episode [05:22] Title music by Dave Schroeder from pilotvibe.com [05:43] Visualizing.org marathon grand prize [09:13] Types of contests and awards [11:28] NSF visualization award has no category for interactive vis [12:28] Academic contests tradition [13:45] VAST Challenge [21:05] Information is beautiful awards [22:15] Lines in the sand [24:23] Information is beautiful awards pt. 2 [25:19] Our favorite entry: “Spotlight of profitability” [31:55] Wrapping up the contests [33:07] Mo’s rant on outrageous RFPs [35:33] Outlook Visualizations Discussed in Detail Some of you voiced the need to have more to see before listening to the episode. Here are the main visuals we discuss in details (click on the images to have a higher resolution version). E-Cube-Librium – Visualizing Marathon 2011 Grand Prize Winner (see how it works: http://invent.ge/ecube-how) Spotlight of Profitability (see 2nd entry in the list) – Information is Beautiful Awards (Our favorite entry for IBA) Contests Mentioned in the Episode NSF Challenge VAST Challenge Information is Beautiful Awards Visualizing Marathon — As usual, let us know what you think. Criticism is welcome.

Hi Folks, in this episode we discuss the goods and bads of animated visualization: 03:26 – Introducing Data Stories 06:05 – Data Animation Kitsch 14:40 – Using Animation Interactively 17:54 – Scientific Research on Animation 27:17 – Eye-candy and the 2D vs. 3D Debate 29:37 – Engagement and “Data Entertainment” 31:19 – Contests and Marathons 41:07 – Conclusion Here are some useful links to follow the discussion. Examples. GE Installations (turbines and imaging scans) Deluge (Norwegians moving house) The Classic Koblin’s Flight Patterns The Classic Yau’s Growth of Walmart KIVA Micro-Loans Well-crafted round-up article by Andy Kirk Research papers on animation. Animation: can it facilitate? Tversky et al. Int. J. Human-Computer Studies (2002) 57, 247–262. Effectiveness of animation in trend visualization. G. Robertson et al. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2008) 14(6) 1325 – 1332. A Comparison of Animated Maps with Static Small-Multiple Maps for Visually Identifying Space-Time Clusters. A. L. Griffin et al. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(4), 2006, pp. 740–753. — What do you think of animation in visualization? Is it effective? Can you resist the allure? Related episodes Data Stories 100!!!