Data Stories

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."

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!)

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)

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?

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!

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.

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. 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!

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 on our website before listening to the podcast. Most of the episode is centered around these examples, which we selected for discussion.

We have graphic editors Mike Bostock and Shan Carter in this dense and long episode. It's great to finally have someone from the New York Times! We talk about many practical and more philosophical aspects of publishing interactive visualizations on the web. We also spend quite some time discussing the past, present and future of D3.js.

We have two fantastic guests to talk about using visualization for the good. We have on stage: Kim Rees co-founder of Periscopic, a data visualization company guided by the motto: "do good with data," and Jake Porway, founder of Data Kind, an organization that brings together data scientists and social organizations. We discuss the challenges of working in this world of big data opportunities and the risks and potentially negative implications of using big data.

In this episode we talk about maps and map technology -- how it has evolved and revolutionized the way we think about geography. We have Michal Migurski with us! He is former technology head at Stamen and creator of multiple successful visualizations libraries and tools like Modest Maps and Crimespotting.

We have Santiago Ortiz with us today. Santiago has an impressive array of data visualization projects that he has been pouring out during the last year, and a very unique style. See for yourself in his portfolio website: http://moebio.com/. We talk about the Tapestry Conference, mathematics, the business of data visualization and much much more. Enjoy it!

One year has passed! It looks crazy that we have been doing this thing for a whole year: 18 whole episodes. Thanks a lot everyone for your encouragements and numerous comments and suggestions. And big thanks to all the people who participated! In this episode we review the whole set of posts and comment on them trying to see how they look like from a distance now that some time has passed.

In this episode we talk about Data Sculptures, also known as Physical Visualization. We invite Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen (from the Aviz Lab at INRIA in Paris) to talk about their experiments with physical bar charts and their fantastic collections of physical visualizations. Pierre and Yvonne give several demos you can see on our recorded video. Make sure you don't miss Pierre giving a real-time demo of Jacques Bertin's reorderable matrix!

Happy New Year Friends! We invited a few experts in a Google Hangout to discuss what was big in 2012 and what will happen in 2013. We have Andrew Vande Moere from Infosthetics, Andy Kirk from Visualisingdata and Bryan Connor from The Why Axis.

We've got Robert Kosara on Data Stories for this episode. Robert is the editor of eagereyes.org, one of the most respected and well-known data visualization blogs on the Internet. He is known for his controversial and informative posts and his "academic" style. But Robert, as he says in the show, wears many hats. He was a Professor of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte until recently, when he surprisingly moved to Tableau after being tenured. In the show we talk about his career choice and many other things: vis research, blogging, Tableau, etc.

In our first Data Stories hangout, ten people joined and more followed the stream off-line. We really enjoyed the hangout; it was a fantastic experiment full of interesting questions and comments. Among others, we had Kim Rees from Periscopic, Benjamin Wiederkehr from Interactive Things, Santiago Ortiz, Stephen Boyd, Miska Knapek, Wes Grubbs from Pitch Interactive, Karen Doore from UT Dallas, Yuri Engelhardt and Jim Vallandingham on the show. Quite a mixture! We hope you enjoy the conversation!

Enrico managed to grab a couple of buddies at VisWeek and record a low-fi episode with some on-the-spot comments. Andrew Vande Moere (infosthetics.com) and Jerome Cukier joined in to have some fun and indulge in some gossiping.

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 three or four hours. Lots, lots of fun! We loved it.

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.