Data Stories

Data Stories

By Enrico Bertini and Moritz StefanerTechnologyEducationArtsVisual Arts
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Data Stories episodes

  • 12 | Alberto Cairo and "The Functional Art"

    Hi, we have Alberto Cairo on the show for Episode #12! If you don’t know who Alberto is, well… it’s your fault! Check his web site first. He has a fantastic book out on Infographics and Visualization called “The Functional Art,” which can directly go in your shelf between the Tuftes and the Fews.

    We talk about the book and many many other things. Alberto is so talkative and deep that we could have recorded for another 3 or 4 hours. Lots, lots of fun! We loved it.

    —

    Episode breakdown:

    00:00:00 Data Stories Number Many

    00:03:29 Special guest today: Alberto Cairo
    00:05:30 Background: Journalism and Teaching
    00:13:01 Book: The functional art
    00:19:25 Low-tech visualization
    00:23:38 Differences between data visualization and information graphics / data journalism
    00:31:51 How to work under practical constraints in a newsroom
    00:39:11 International news graphics scene
    00:42:37 Experimentalism vs conservatism
    00:46:52 Connect print and online
    00:48:17 Flash! (ah, the good times)
    00:49:40 Back to “The Functional Art”
    00:53:21 The visualization wheel
    00:57:59 Use of multiple representations
    01:04:02 Power of annotations
    01:05:44 Wrapping it up

    1 hr 8 min
  • 011  |  emoto (with Stephan Thiel from Studio NAND)

    Hi Folks,

    In this episode we talk about emoto, the project on visualizing the sentiment of the Olympic Games in London 2012.

    Since Moritz was one of the principal designers and developers behind the project, we thought: “hey, why not?!”

    And we have a special guest! Stephan Thiel from Studio NAND joined us to share his own view and experience with the project.

    Make sure to give a look to the emoto web site and the accompanying blog before listening to the podcast if you can, this will help you following our discussion … just in case you are not familiar with the project yet … just in case.

    00:00:00 Intro – catching up

    00:04:44 emoto – with our special guest Stephan Thiel from Studio NAND
    00:06:58 How it all started
    00:09:32 The team
    00:13:19 Live sentiment visualization
    00:17:44 How to test a real-time system for a one-off event?
    00:21:09 The processing timeline
    00:24:56 Sentiment analysis
    00:27:06 Topic detection – supervised vs. unsupervised
    00:28:17 The other project parts – data blog and data sculpture
    00:31:00 Origami visualization
    00:38:10 Color scale
    00:42:34 Message stream view
    00:49:00 “Sentigraphs”
    00:54:47 Data sculpture
    01:00:30 What’s next

    Have fun!

    Enrico & Moritz.

    P.S. Feedback always welcome.

    1 hr 7 min
  • 010  |  Hand crafted data (with Stefanie Posavec)

    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

      1 hr 6 min
    • 009  |  Bridging academia and industry with Danyel Fisher

      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

      1 hr 16 min
    • 008  |  Interview with Jeff Heer

      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!

      1 hr 17 min
    • 007  |  Color (feat. Gregor Aisch)

      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

        1 hr
      • 006  |  On Food

        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!

          42 min
        • 005  |  How To Learn Data Visualization (with Andy Kirk)

          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.

              1 hr 11 min
            • 004  |  Malofiej 20 (with Andy Kirk)

              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

              1 hr 10 min
            • 003  |  How do you evaluate visualization?

              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!

                  49 min

                About Data Stories

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                A podcast on data and how it affects our lives — with Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner