Data Stories

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We have Eva-Lotta Lamm joining us to talk about the value of sketching and how it relates to data visualization. Eva-Lotta is a UX designer turned expert on sketching and sketchnoting: the art of summarizing talks through sketches. In the show we talk about visual thinking, sketchnoting and parallels with data visualization.

Links

• Sketchnotes from Moritz’s talk at FH Potsdam
• Some recent sketchnotes from other conferences:
  • https://www.evalotta.net/blog/2019/6/14/sketchnotes-from-ux-london-2019
  • https://www.evalotta.net/blog/2019/5/17/sketchnotes-from-berlin-letters
  • https://www.evalotta.net/blog/2017/11/19/sketchnotes-from-ixds-pre-work-talks-on-artificial-intelligence
• The 5 Steps to change your note taking talk
• Blog post: How improvisation influences my visual practice
• The Milan workshop
• Eva-Lotta’s reading list
• The Mini Visual Starter Kit
• www.yoganotes.net
• @evalottchen on Instagram

[Our podcast is fully listener-supported. That’s why you don’t have to listen to ads! Please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon or sending us a one-time donation through Paypal. And thank you!]

Have you heard of the “Data Visualization Society”? This is a new initiative started by visualization designers Amy Cesal, Mollie Pettit and Elijah Meeks. The DVS started with a simple form and a Slack channel and experienced in a few days a massive level of interest (more than 3000 people signed-up in a matter of days). On the show we talk with the founders to know more about how this happened, interesting stories about what people are doing within DVS and plans for the future. Enjoy the show!

Update: After the recording took place, DVS also launched their annual data visualization community survey. Make sure to take part (before June 15, 2019).

• Catching up with Amanda Makulec

[Our podcast is fully listener-supported. That’s why you don’t have to listen to ads! Please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon or sending us a one-time donation through Paypal. And thank you!]

We have Tim Dwyer on the show to talk about Immersive Analytics, the use of virtual reality and other immersive technology to analyze and present data visually. Tim is a Professor of Data Visualisation and Immersive Analytics at Monash University in Melbourne and his research focuses on the human and technological aspect of immersive analytics. On the show we talk about what immersive analytics is, what are the major opportunities and challenges and how one gets started experimenting with it. Tim also talks about some of the specific projects he and his collaborators developed on his lab.

Links

• Book: Immersive Analytics
• HoloLens 2
• Magic Leap
• Milgram’s article on Augmented Reality
• Videos of Tim’s research work:
  • Origin-Destination Flow Maps
  • Scaptics and Highlight-Planes
  • Maps and Globes in VR
  • ImAxes – Immersive Multivariate Data Visualisation in Virtual Reality
  • IATK – An Immersive Analytics Toolkit

[Our podcast is fully listener-supported. That’s why you don’t have to listen to ads! Please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon or sending us a one-time donation through Paypal. And thank you!]

How do you represent data with sound instead of graphical properties? Is it even possible?

It turns out that it’s not only possible, but there is an entire field — called sonification — that is dedicated to representing data with sound.

In this episode we are joined by Hannah Davis, a data visualization and sonification expert, to talk about how sonification works and how she has gone about making her own amazing sonification projects, which create musical pieces based on data. Get your ears ready! This time you are not only going to listen to our voices but also to some really interesting sounds!

P.S. We’ve actually touched upon sonification once before in Data Stories. Check out our episode with Scott Hughes on the sonification of black holes.

LINKS

• Moritz’s Course
  • Beyond Heatmaps: Course on climate change visualization at the Digital Media program at HfK Bremen
  • Listen: Apple Blossom is Shifting by Katja Striedelmeyer

• We talked about sonification once before!
  • http://datastori.es/75-sonification-scott-hughes/

• Sonification examples
  • Fractions of a second
  • Match 104 – James Murphy Remix | The US Open Sessions

• Hannah
  • Hannah’s web site: http://www.hannahishere.com
  • Hannah’s talk at Eyeo 2018
  • Article: Subjective Data

• Hannah’s projects
  • Sonified Data
  • TransProse (Peter Pan, The Road, Clockwork Orange)
  • Text to Music Generator
  • At the Louvre: Human-Computer Symphony
  • UFO Data (file 1, file 2)
  • Percival with SynthBeats laptop orchestra
  • Laughing room

• How folks can get started with sonification
  • http://app.twotone.io
  • Jsmidgen: https://github.com/dingram/jsmidgen
  • Midiutil: https://pypi.org/project/MIDIUtil/
  • Workshop on Turning Data into Sound and Music
  • Make a Twitter Audio Bot That Composes a Song Based on a Tweet

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Today we are joined by Cameron Beccario who created the immensely impressive Earth visualization — a beautiful, geeky, mesmerizing look at the small blue marble we call home. On the show Cameron tells us all about the story behind the project, its evolution, and its reception — plus, at the end, we have a bonus chat about the state of data visualization in Japan.

Enjoy the show!

Links

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We have Pedro Cruz and John Wihbey on the show to talk about their beautiful project, the Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration. There are many ways that immigration can be represented visually, but Pedro and John came up with a very compelling one: they use the metaphor of tree rings to show how migration patterns of people to the United States have changed over time. The final piece is utterly beautiful and evocative: we are the product of many layers of immigration.

On the show we talk about how they came up with this idea, the implementation of the visualization, the attempts they tried before producing the final version, and the role of metaphors in visualization. Make sure you take a closer look at the visualization before listening!

And enjoy the show!

Links

• Project Page and Video
• Pedro Cruz
• John Wihbey
• George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
• Andrew Ortony,  “Metaphor and Representation” in Metaphor and Thought
• Donna Cox “The Art and Science of Visualization: Metaphorical Maps and Cultural Models”
• John’s upcoming book: The Social Fact (MIT Press, April 2019)

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Oh dashboards… dashboards… what are they? For some, they are just ugly examples of bad visualization design (speed dials anyone?). For others, they are a first citizen of the data visualization world that deserve to be learned, studied, and understood.

To dig into this debate, we have Lyn Bartram of Simon Fraser University and Alper Sarikaya of Microsoft Power BI on the show to talk about an exciting research project they developed. Their research seeks to build a better picture of what dashboard are and how they are used “in the wild.” The results are summarized in a paper they wrote with their colleagues from Tableau and Honeycomb.io: What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Dashboards?

On the show we talk about how the project got started, what they discovered by analyzing a large corpus of dashboards, and the many ramifications of their research.

Enjoy the show!

Links

[Our podcast is fully supported by our listeners. Please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon or sending us a one-time donation through Paypal. Thanks!]

What is uncertainty? Why is it important to take it into account when designing data visualizations? And how do you actually do so? We explore these and other questions with Jessica Hullman of Northwestern University and Matthew Kay of the University of Michigan. Jessica and Matt have written many publications on the topic that help orient us to the intricate world of uncertainty, probabilities, and their relevance to data visualization.

We hope you enjoy the show!

Links

[Thinking of gift-giving this holiday season? Consider a gift to Data Stories! You can join our growing community of Patreons or make a one-time donation to us on Paypal.]

Here we go! Another year has passed and lots has happened in the data visualization world. This time we decided to scramble things up again with a new annual review format: five podcasters (including ourselves!) reflecting back on year 2018. We’re lucky to be joined by Jon Schwabish from PolicyViz, Alli Torban from DataViz Today, and Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic from Storytelling with Data.

This was a long chat! But we had a lot to cover: major trends, favorite projects, new tools, and standout people, companies, studios, conferences, books, and blogs. There is a lot to learn there. Don’t miss our long list of links below!

As always, thanks for following along with us this year. And special thanks go to our supporters and to Destry and Florian for their amazing work behind the scenes.

We wish you all Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

Links

Major Trends

Favorite Projects

Noteworthy Tools

Standout People, Companies and Studios

Conferences

Books

Books Coming in 2019

Blogs

[Thinking of gift-giving this holiday season? Consider a gift to Data Stories! You can join our growing community of Patreons or make a one-time donation to us on Paypal.]

We have data visualization freelancer and old friend-of-the-podcast Andy Kirk with us to talk about a new generation of data viz tools. You may not have noticed yet, but there are a quite a few nice new tools in development — and they all seem to have one thing in common: granting more artistic freedom to users while requiring less programming.

On the show we start by talking about the precursors to this generation of tools, such as Lyra and Data Driven Guides. We then pivot to the latest developments including Charticulator, Adobe’s Data Illustrator, and Lincoln.

What do these tools make possible that is still impossible or not so easy to do with the existing tools? What are their more exciting features? How do they differ in the way that they work? Why are we observing this trend now? And are they ultimately going to become real products? We ponder these and other questions on the show with Andy.

Enjoy listening!

Links

• Visualizing Data with RAW
• Datawrapper with Lisa C. Rost and Gregor Aisch
• Flourish with Duncan Clark