Data Stories

Ah! We made it to 50 episodes and three years of this lovely podcast of ours. We have loved every bit of it, every guest, every single discussion and all the support we received from everyone. For this episode we asked repeatedly to submit a short audio snippet or text and we received a few amazing ones. We are very grateful to you all guys, this is amazing. In the episode we talk about a few statistics we extracted on episodes with highest number of listeners and blog posts with highest number of visits. We then read the text messages we received. And finally we have inserted the audio messages we received. THANKS A LOT! This is amazing. P.S. Special thanks to Erik Jacobson for his amazing collage! :) LINKS Most popular episodes (of about the last 12 months) Data Stories #39: DensityDesign w/ Paolo Ciuccarelli Data Stories #38: Visual Complexity w/ Manuel Lima Data Stories #40: Narrative Visualization Research w/ Jessica Hullman Data Stories #44: w/ Tamara Munzner Most popular pages: Data Stories #5

Hi everyone, In this episode we have Scott Klein from ProPublica with us. ProPublica is a nonprofit organization that does investigative journalism and Scott directs a team of data journalists and programmers to create new applications based on data and data visualization. In the show we talk about how ProPublica works and what challenges they are confronted with. How do you pick a story? How do you develop it? How do you make sure you are not making mistakes? This are some of the questions we discuss. We also talk about tools and libraries and how to train yourself to become a data journalist. This was a very much needed episode as we never had a proper episode on data journalism. Thanks Scott for coming on the show! --- LINKS ProPublica's Dollars for Docs Book: How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg PDF Scraping Tool: Tabula (http://tabula.technology/) The IPython Notebook (web-based interactive computational environment) ProPublica's Open Source Tools The New School's Program Journalism + Design The

Great episode here folks! We have Stamen's CEO Eric Rodenbeck on the show to talk about "Visualization Going Mainstream". Moritz took inspiration from Eric's Eyeo talk "And Then There Were Twelve – How to (keep) running a successful data visualization and design studio." and decided he must come on the show. Stamen is a design studio in San Francisco founded in 2001 by Eric. They have been real pioneers in data visualization and cartographic mapping with the production of great apps and libraries such as Pretty Maps, Trulia Hindsight, Crimespotting and many many more. (See also our episode with Mike Migurski) With Eric we discuss a broad range of important topics including: how to manage a vis business, how to have an impact with visualization and visualization success stories. Enjoy the show! LINKS Eric’s talk at Eyeo Stamen’s Digg Labs visualization Founder of Digg Kevin Rose First word art / last word art Book: Maps and Legends Out of Sight, Out of Mind - Pitch Interactive’s Drones Visualization

Data visualization researcher Enrico Bertini and Truth & Beauty Operator Moritz Stefaner discuss their views on data visualization, infographics, information aesthetics and related themes. http://datastori.es http://twitter.com/datastories

We have two classic guests for a classic episode: a year review with Robert Kosara and Andy Kirk. We talk about what happened in visualization in 2014 and what may happen in 2015. We start the show saying that nothing really special happened, but then you'll see we cover a lot of ground and end up eventually deciding that a lot did happen!

Happy new year, everyone! We start 2015 with a bang, and have Nicholas Felton on the show. We talk about his personal annual reports, typography, privacy, and how we all deal with data and tracking today. Great conversation. One more link we only found later: Practical Typography is a great starting point for anyone who would like to learn more about typography and type. Thanks again to Tableau Software for sponsoring the show! Check out the free trial they have, it's a great piece of software. And, in other news: We are looking for support with the audio editing! So, if you have some experience with audio editing podcasts, and could also imagine to help us with collection the links and titling the chapters etc, this would be great. We can offer a small compensation, too. And, of course, you're among the very first people worldwide to listen to the new Data Stories recordings :) Next week, we will record a 2014 review with a few of the usual suspects. What moved you this year? Leave us a comment or twe

We have Prof. Tamara Munzner from University of British Columbia with us in this episode. Tamara is one of the most prominent figures in visualization research. She has done tons of interesting work starting from the nineties (look into her publications page) including the famous "Nested Model of Visualization Design" and her numerous design studies work, like the excellent "Overview," a tool for journalistic investigative analysis. We also talk about her new book "Visualization Analysis and Design." Finally a textbook teaching how to create visualization tools for analysis purposes!

It took us a while, but — here we go! A three part episode from IEEE VIS 2014. Thanks again to Robert Kosara for coming on our show again to talk shop, and look back on a week full of really interesting scientific findings about data visualization.

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!

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.

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!

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! --- Links Cyber-Geography Maps (early inspiration) Density Design Flicker Stream Density Design Blog 99 Models of Design Processes Mapping the Republic of Letters (and this: http://athanasius.stanford.edu/) Franco Moretti's Distant Readings and Giorgio Caviglia (and the “incorporation” of d

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. Links Manuel’s master thesis at Parson’s: BlogViz Visual Complexity (Book) Visual Complexity (Website) The Book of Trees Information Visualization Manifesto (check the comments section!) Manuel’s Current Employer: Code Academy Infosthetics Blog Barabasi’s Linked: http://barabasilab.com/LinkedBook/ Johnson’s Emergence Visual Simplexity (Book) The Allosphere Display

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! Links Santiago Ortiz's: 45 ways to communicate two quantities John Swabisch's HelpMeViz (to teach by good/bad examples) Sco

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. Links - The IEEE VIS'14 Art Program (that's going to be in Paris) - NYU ITP Data Art Course - Cascade (vis of NYT sharing activity) - Shakespeare Machine (earstudio | video on vimeo) - Jer's HBR article on "Visualization as Process, Not

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 has a lot more to say after the episode so he decided to publish a linked post that clarifies some of the things he said on the show. You find the post here: ... P.S. Big, big thanks to Fabricio Tavares for taking care of the audio editing of this episode! --- Links Lynn Chen on Implied Stories (and Data Vis) Periscopic's Dino Citr

[Thanks to our audio editor Nathan Griffiths (https://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. Links The debate of Gregor & Moritz with Simon on colors (and Simon pissed off by it :)) Creative tools: CartoDB and DataWrapper? Twitter Data Blog (where new projects are announced) Overview page of Twitter visualizations Simon's post: Data Journalism as Punk [very interesting concept!] Simon's infographics kid books: Animal Kingdom and Human Body

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! Links How HelpMeViz works ... Jon's "An Economist's Guide to Visualizing Data" (full of very nice examples of chart redesign) Interesting discussi

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.

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: mail@datastori.es. 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 Snawfall 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 Blo