Data Stories

In this episode we have the honor of talking with "data illustrator" Stefanie Posavec. Stefanie makes fascinating hand-crafted visualizations 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. Her work is so intriguing that we wanted to know more about her process.

In this episode we talk about bridging academia and industry. We've touched upon this issue many times in the past that we decided to record a whole a special issue about it. To help us, we invited Danyel Fisher, a renowned 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 fairly academic conference. We discuss existing practices, gaps, and ways to bridge them.

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 at 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. We talk about the past, present and future of visualization; everything dressed with LOLs, a bit of gossip and...one scoop at the end of the podcast!

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.

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.

We love Andy so much that we decided to keep him with us for another episode. This time we talk about how to learn visualization, which is the perfect topic for Andy given his experience teaching visualization courses and trainings.

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.

First we answer the listener questions we have received. Then we move on to the main topic: how do you evaluate visualization? After discussion some contests in episode #2, we've realized how key an issue evaluation is here.

We talk mainly about contests, awards, marathons, etc. And Mo goes on a rant at the end!

In this episode we introduce Data Stories and discuss the good and bad of animated visualization