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Data Stories
Data Stories episodes
- 032 | High Density Infographics and Data Drawing w/ Giorgia Lupi
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.”
58 min - 031 | Review, preview w/ Robert Kosara and Andy Kirk
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: [email protected]. 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
1 hr 20 min - 30 | The Information Flaneur w/ Marian Dörk
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
1 hr 3 min - 29 | Treemaps w/ Ben Shneiderman
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.
1 hr 5 min - 028 | IEEE VIS'13 Highlights w/ Robert Kosara
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
50 min - 027 | Big Data Skepticism w/ Kate Crawford
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 Saitta
- Calling Bullshit with Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West
- Visualization and Statistics with Andrew Gelman and Jessica Hullman
1 hr 6 min - 026 | Visualization Beyond the Desktop w/ Petra Isenberg
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.
APAResource 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)
59 min - 025 | Visualization on Mobile & Touch Devices w/ Dominikus Baur
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 Baur00:04:06 Life logging and personal media00:05:10 Accents00:05:39 Why mobile visualization, and how is it different from desktop visualizations?00:09:24 Mobile interaction00:13:27 Mobiles for interaction with other displays00:14:38 Augmented reality00:15:54 TouchWave – touch interaction with stacked graphs00:21:52 Multitouch00:24:45 Analytical, advanced visualization on mobile?00:26:44 Self-tracking and life logging00:31:17 Daytum app00:32:54 Other good mobile visualization apps00:35:12 Second screen apps00:36:28 Moritz wants an atlas00:37:04 The age of ghettoblasters00:38:00 Use mobiles to interact with large screens00:41:48 Technology: native, or web-based?00:46:07 Better Life Index: HTML5 port works on mobiles, tablets00:48:00 Research on mobile and touch interactions00:50:39 Large screens00:58:54 How to get started01:01:13 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
1 hr 5 min - 024 | The VAST Challenge: Visual Analytics Competitions with Synthetic Benchmark Data Sets
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.
1 hr 10 min - 023 | Inspiration or Plagiarism? w/ Bryan Connor and Mahir Yavuz
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 Flattr00:03:46 Main topic today: inspiration or plagiarism with our guests Mahir M. Yavuz and Bryan Connor00:07:53 Is data visualization turning into a copycat scene?00:08:32 Remake of subway map by New Yorker00:13:19 Patterns00:14:03 Idea – technology – aesthetics00:16:06 Patterns ctd.00:18:19 Gun murders – drone strikes – meteorites00:23:19 What constitutes an “outrageous rip-off”?00:27:31 On originality00:33:07 Guardian Gay Rights / Gun Laws graphic00:37:53 On the value of reproduction and chains of inspiration00:44:01 Stream graphs00:49:01 Value of transparent documentation of process00:50:44 Non-patterns00:53:13 Remix culture, github culture00:54:48 Snow fall00:58:04 Patents01:01:47 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
1 hr 17 min
About Data Stories
From the publisher's feed
A podcast on data and how it affects our lives — with Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner