Data Stories

This week we have Mahir Yavuz and Jan Willem Tulp on the show to talk about navigating the business side of data visualization. Mahir is Creative Director of Data Science and Visualization at R/GA and Jan Willem is a data visualization freelancer and founder of Tulp Interactive.

“How do you choose which projects to work on? How do you actually get paid for them? How do you deal with ‘The Data Will Come Soon’ syndrome? And what do you do with unreasonable requests from clients?”

We talk about these and other issues. This is a perfect episode for those of you who want to figure out how to make a living from data visualization.

Enjoy the show!

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Qlik has partnered with Circle of Blue to visualize seven years of water rates data from 30 major U.S. cities. Check out the analyses and charts at the Circle of Blue blog. And make sure to try out Qlik Sense for free at: qlik.de/datastories.

LINKS

• Bridging academia and industry with Danyel Fisher
• Inspiration or Plagiarism? w/ Bryan Connor and Mahir Yavuz
• Challenges of Being a Vis Professional in Industry with Elijah Meeks

We have Dietmar Offenhuber, Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, on the show again to talk about “Indexical Visualizations”: visualizations that reduce the gap between the recorded phenomenon and its representation.

In Dietmar’s words: “If we understand ‘data’ as a collection of symbolically encoded observations, could we think of a display that conveys information—without the symbolic encoding of data—through the object itself?”

On the show we talk about strategies to define and build indexical visualizations. Dietmar provides numerous examples, including thermometers, tree rings, petri dishes, and the blinking lights in your router. He also offers tips on experimenting with this kind of visualization and connecting to the indexical vis community.

If you enjoy this episode you may also want to listen to our previous episode with Dietmar and to our “data sculptures” episode with Domestic Data Streamers.

Enjoy the show!

This episode is sponsored by Tableau. Tableau helps people see and understand their data. Tableau 10 is the latest version of the company’s rapid fire, easy-to-use visual analytics software. It includes a completely refreshed design, mobile enhancements, new options for preparing, integrating and connecting to data and a host of new enterprise capabilities. You can find more information on the upcoming Tableau 10 here.

LINKS

Isabel Meirelles is Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Design for Information, a lovely data visualization book featuring pages of beautiful illustrations and loads of data visualization science. On the show we talk about how Isabel came to write the book, how she designed its content and structure, and how it is now being used for teaching.

We also talk about Information Plus, the data visualization conference she co-organized and took place last June in Vancouver, Canada at Emily Carr University. The conference brought together a whole host of amazing speakers and gained tons of attention from the Twitter-sphere.

Enjoy the show!

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Any Formula 1 fans out there? Check out this Qlik Sense app which gives you the history of every race and where each competitor finished. And make sure to try out Qlik Sense for free at: qlik.de/datastories.

Links

Isabel Meirelles

Isabel’s Information Design Course

Isabel’s Book: Design for Information

Information+ Conference

Shneiderman’s Information Seeking Mantra

Tamara Munzner’s Design Studies Process Model

Gregor Aisch’s adaptation of Information Seeking Mantra to mobile screens:

This week Mimi Onuoha joins Moritz on the show for a project episode from the Eyeo Festival. Mimi is a Brooklyn-based artist and researcher, and currently a Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute.

Mimi is fascinated by the moment when data get collected — by what can be captured in that moment, and what goes unseen. As a Fulbright-National Geographic Fellow, Mimi developed Pathways, a data storytelling project on a month’s worth of mobile data from a small group of Londoners. Using a quasi-ethnographic approach, the project reflects not only the individuals’ mobile metadata, but also their experiences becoming data subjects.

On the show, we discuss Mimi’s process recruiting both friends and strangers to become her data subjects, her experience developing personal relationships with each of them, and their reaction to the final product. 

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Ever wondered what it costs to live in Singapore or Sydney? Check out the Qlik Sense app “Cost of Living” to answer that question and many others! And make sure to try out Qlik Sense for free at: qlik.de/datastories.

LINKS

We have Matt Daniels on the show, the “journalist engineer” behind Polygraph, a blog featuring beautiful journalistic pieces based on data. If you are not familiar with the site, stop now and take a look.

Matt starts with a simple question — for example, what songs from the ’90s are still popular? — and tries to answer it through data analysis and visualization. The result is always a well-crafted web page and applications, with a mix of data analysis, interactive graphics, and explanations.

On the show we talk specifically about two projects: “The most timeless songs of all-time,” in which Matt analyzes song popularity from Spotify data, and “Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age,” in which he examines movie dialogues as a way to dig deeper into gender biases in the film industry.

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by CartoDB. CartoDB is an open, powerful, and intuitive platform for discovering and predicting the key facts underlying the massive location data in our world. Whether you are a business, government agency, or simply a lover of revolutionary spatial insight technology, don’t settle for anything less than the best interactive maps around. Learn how CartoDB is shaping the world of location intelligence at cartodb.com/gallery and check out the Location Data Services mentioned in the ad.

LINKS

Matt Daniels

• Data Safaris w/ Benedikt Groß
• Behind the Scenes of "What's Really Warming The World?" with the Bloomberg Team
• Visualizing Your "Google Search History" with Lisa Charlotte Rost
• Kim Albrecht on Untangling Tennis and the Cosmic Web
• The Pudding with Matt Daniels

On the show this week we have Irene Ros, Jim Vallandingham, and Yannick Assogba from the data visualization team of Bocoup. We talk about how they collaborate with other groups to create open-source data visualization software. We also talk about OpenVis Conference, the successful and innovative visualization event they organize each year, as well as the cool visualization projects they develop internally.

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by CartoDB. CartoDB is an open, powerful, and intuitive platform for discovering and predicting the key facts underlying the massive location data in our world. Whether you are a business, government agency, or simply a lover of revolutionary spatial insight technology, don’t settle for anything less than the best interactive maps around. Learn how CartoDB is shaping the world of location intelligence at cartodb.com/gallery.

LINKS

• Jeff Heer on Merging Industry and Research with the Interactive Data Lab
• Information+ Conference Review

Dear friends, we are really excited to publish our first “data sonification” episode ever! After many years of searching for the right person, subject and format, we are happy to publish this fantastic episode with Scott Hughes from MIT. Scott is an astrophysicist and a key figure at LIGO, the laser interferometer project that finally allowed scientists to “listen” to the sound of two colliding black holes.

Here Scott talks about how he decided to sonify his data and how sonification is being used by scientists to understand astrophysical phenomena.

Listen as we play a number of samples; Scott walks us through their meaning and the physics behind them. It’s really really cool. Warm up your ears!

You can also listen to some samples from Scott Hughes and his team here:

Huge thanks to Scott for spending so much time with us preparing the sounds and recording the show. We loved it!

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by CartoDB. CartoDB is an open, powerful, and intuitive platform for discovering and predicting the key facts underlying the massive location data in our world. Whether you are a business, government agency, or simply a lover of revolutionary spatial insight technology, don’t settle for anything less than the best interactive maps around. Learn how CartoDB is shaping the world of location intelligence at cartodb.com/gallery.

LINKS

• Data Visualization Accessibility with Sarah Fossheim

We have Eleanor Saitta on the show to talk about data privacy. Eleanor is “a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian.” She is also Etsy’s new Security Architect.

During our chat we discuss the fine line between the excitement of being able to work with great data sets and the many — oftentimes unexpected — privacy risks associated with it.

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Make sure to check out the data visualization mapping tutorial on the Qlik Blog. You can try out Qlik Sense for free at: qlik.de/datastories.

LINKS

• Big Data Skepticism w/ Kate Crawford
• Calling Bullshit with Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West

Kim is a visualization researcher and information designer. He currently works at the Center for Complex Network Research, the lab led by famous network physicist László Barabási.

Kim works in a team of scientists to create effective and beautiful visualizations that explain complex scientific phenomena.

In the show we focus on Untangling Tennis, a data visualization project aimed at explaining the relationship between popularity and athletic performance. We also talk about his more recent project, the Cosmic Web, which visualizes 24,000 galaxies and their network of gravitational relationships.

Enjoy the show!

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Make sure to check out the blog post listing Visualization Advocate Patrik Lundblad’s favorite data visualization pioneers. You can try out Qlik Sense for free at qlik.de/datastories.

LINKS

• Science Communication at SciAm w/ Jen Christiansen
• Polygraph and The Journalist Engineer Matt Daniels

Jeff Heer is Associate Professor at the University of Washington where he leads the Interactive Data Lab (IDL). Jeff has worked on many visualization libraries and software programs, including Prefuse, Flare, Protovis and the widely adopted D3 (with his former PhD student Mike Bostock). Jeff is also the co-founder of Trifacta, a data analytics company focused on data wrangling.

On the show we talk about many interesting research tools and products developed in Jeff’s lab, including Vega, Voyager and Lyra. We also talk about Trifacta and the challenges and promises of visualization research.

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, which you can download for free at www.qlik.de/datastories. Make sure to check out their post on truth & beauty (!) at the Qlik blog.

• Bocoup and OpenVis Conference
• Challenges of Being a Vis Professional in Industry with Elijah Meeks