Randall Munroe is the mastermind behind the xkcd webcomics which have zillions of fans around the globe. In his stick figure cartoons and hilarious mini-stories, he comments on complicated scientific issues. Over the years, Randall has also created a number of data-heavy visualizations. Some of them tackle pressing issues such as climate change, while others mock conventions of visualization such as map projections or chart types.
We have Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic on the show to talk about her work in visual storytelling.
We have famous cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud on the show to talk about making comics, storytelling, virtual reality and what vis people can learn from comics.
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!
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Links
Lynn Chen on Implied Stories (and Data Vis)
Periscopic's Dino Citraro on A Framework for Talking About Data Narration
Book cited by Alberto: The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
Great visualizations without stories (proposed by Moritz):
Aron Koblin's Flight Patterns
Martin Wattenberg's Map of the Market
Moritz position on stories: Look ma, no story! | Worlds, not stories
Enrico's position on stories: Telling a story doesn’t tell the whole story
Robert series on storytelling: Stories Are Gateways Into Worlds | Story: A Definition
Robert's mention of visualization on Copenhagen: Emissions, Treaties and Impacts
Jessica Hallman's VIS'13 paper on: Deeper Understanding of Sequence in Visualization
In this new episode, we talk about the interplay between statistics and data visualization. We do that with Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University, and Jessica Hullman, Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. Andrew started the popular blog “Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science,” which has an active …
Duncan is the CEO of Flourish, a popular data visualization tool to help people create storytelling visualizations from data. Duncan founded Flourish together with Robin Houston in 2016 and since then they made a lot of progress and acquired a large user base.
Hi everyone! We are once again at the end of a whole year. After having “end of the year episodes” with other podcasters, going around the world, and chatting with Andy and Robert, we decided to try something different this time: we asked a group of data visualization professionals to send us an audio snippet …
Here we go! Another year has passed and lots has happened in the data visualization world.
We have Lisa C. Rost and Gregor Aisch on the show to talk about the exciting work they are doing at Datawrapper.
This week, we have Elijah Meeks on the show to talk about the state of data visualization jobs in the industry.
