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Hi all,

We 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 in the Internet. He is known for his controversial and informative posts and his “academic” style (some people say ).

But Roberts, 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 choice and many other things: vis research, blogging, Tableau, etc. See the episode breakdown below.

And, as usual, have fun!

Enrico & Moritz

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00:00:00 Enrico and Moritz catching up
00:04:22 Today’s guest: Robert Kosara
00:05:23 eagereyes.org and blogging in general
00:08:14 Enrico’s blog
00:09:46 Robert’s research themes
00:11:35 Blur as a retinal variable?
00:13:13 Interdisciplinarity in infovis research
00:14:31 How Robert got started
00:19:04 Early years of eagereyes.org and abandoned plans for the site
00:21:59 “lines in the sand”
00:27:04 What will the future bring for eagereyes?
00:30:58 State of visualization blogging
00:33:16 Blogging and academic careers
00:36:17 Openness and sharing ideas
00:43:04 The real story! Robert’s move to Tableau
00:51:22 Researching: storytelling with data
00:55:40 Visualization in wider communication contexts and workflows
00:59:13 Tableau for Mac?
01:01:36 A few ideas for improvement
01:03:12 Clevelandgate
01:08:16 Future for word clouds as a final slide for powerpoint presentations?
01:10:14 Robert’s influences?
01:13:38 How much work was it to release Parallel Sets, and was it worth it?
01:16:13 Wrapping it up

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Hey Folks!

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

A few papers we mention in the episode (may be not complete):

• How Capacity Limits of Attention Influence Information Visualization Effectiveness. [Best Paper award]. Steve Haroz, David Whitney.
• Evaluating the Effect of Style in Information Visualization. Vande Moere et al.
• Investigating Physical Visualizations. Yvonne Jansen et al.
• Sketchy Rendering for Information Visualization. Jo Wood et al.

Have fun! And hey … big big thank yous to all the data stories listeners who stopped me to say hi. I loved it!

-Enrico.

P.S. Moritz was not there and lots of people asked me about him. What can I do? Just let him know how much you want to see him (he will hate me for writing this )!

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 Keruac’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.

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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!

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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!

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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 topic 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

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As usual your feedback is more than welcome. And let us know if you intend to do some visualization with food data. Have fun!

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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 of 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

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That’s all folks. Let us know how you like it and feel free to ask more questions if you have.