Hey folks we have some news: Now, for the first time, Data Stories has a sponsor. Tableau Software will be sponsoring a number of episodes starting with this one. You will hear the specifics in the audio but this is good news for everyone. The content will not change, but we will be able to create a higher-quality show. And, by the way, we will also be able to pay a fee to our audio editors who have done a lot of free work for us so far (thanks Nathan and Fabricio!)

You can try Tableau following this link: www.tableausoftware.com/datastories.

Hi all, we have the great Santiago Ortiz with us again in this episode.

Santiago builds interactive data visualizations to “get deep insight from data, solve real problems and answer strategic questions.”

If you are an avid DS follower you may recall that we had him on the show in episode 19. In this episode he comes back to talk with us about visualization and data science, how he strives to create value out of his data visualization projects and how he is *not* interested data visualization!

Enjoy the show!

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Hi Folks! In this episode we have Lisa Strausfeld from Bloomberg with us.

Lisa started doing VIS very early on. In the episode she tells us about her super interesting story of how she got into VIS and all the jobs she has had: starting as a student of Art and Computer Science (yes, Art and CS!), designing chips for Motorola, and now these days working at Bloomberg Visual Data and Bloomberg View.

If you want to know more about her work you should definitely check out this video, where she presents may of the visualization projects we discussed.

Enjoy the show!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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!]

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• 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!

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[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.

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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!

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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!