Data Stories

Latest Episodes:

August 28, 2013 - Dietmar Offenhuber, a new faculty member in the College of Arts, Media and Design and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, specializes in visualization and information design. — **80 | Indexical Visualization with Dietmar Offenhuber** Aug 10, 2016
Show notes

We have Dietmar Offenhuber, Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, on the show again to talk about “*Indexical Visualizations*”: visualizations that reduce the gap between the recorded phenomenon and its representation.

In Dietmar’s words: “If we understand ‘data’ as a collection of symbolically encoded observations, could we think of a display that conveys information—without the symbolic encoding of data—through the object itself?”

On the show we talk about strategies to define and build indexical visualizations. Dietmar provides numerous examples, including thermometers, tree rings, petri dishes, and the blinking lights in your router. He also offers tips on experimenting with this kind of visualization and connecting to the indexical vis community.

If you enjoy this episode you may also want to listen to our previous episode with Dietmar and to our “data sculptures” episode with Domestic Data Streamers.

Enjoy the show!

This episode is sponsored by Tableau. Tableau helps people see and understand their data. Tableau 10 is the latest version of the company’s rapid fire, easy-to-use visual analytics software. It includes a completely refreshed design, mobile enhancements, new options for preparing, integrating and connecting to data and a host of new enterprise capabilities. You can find more information on the upcoming Tableau 10 here.

LINKS

OddOne (who made our new title music)

Dietmar Offenhuber: http://offenhuber.net/

Paul Slovic’s “Psychic Numbing”

Example: Kamel Makhloufi’s Iraqi casualties

Example: Hydrogen sulfide measurement

Documentation from Indexical Design Symposium

Photoviz book from Nicolas Felton

Related Data Stories episodes:

DS 51 | Smart Cities w/ Dietmar Offenhuber

DS 58 | Data Installations w/ Domestic Data Streamers

Book chapter: Offenhuber, Dietmar, and Orkan Telhan. 2015. “Indexical Visualization—the Data-Less Information Display.” In Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture, edited by Ulrik Ekman, Jay David Bolter, Lily Diaz, Morten Søndergaard, and Maria Engberg, 288–303. New York: Routledge.

Other examples:

Standing Waves on a String

Bubble Chamber Representations

http://www.highres.factum-arte.org/Tutankhamun/

Pinterest’s collection of indexical visualizations

Hydrogen Sulfide Measurement

Slime Mold

Latent Figure Protocol

79 | Information Design with Isabel Meirelles Jul 27, 2016

Show notes

Isabel Meirelles is Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Design for Information, a lovely data visualization book featuring pages of beautiful illustrations and loads of data visualization science. On the show we talk about how Isabel came to write the book, how she designed its content and structure, and how it is now being used for teaching.

We also talk about Information Plus, the data visualization conference she co-organized and took place last June in Vancouver, Canada at Emily Carr University. The conference brought together a whole host of amazing speakers and gained tons of attention from the Twitter-sphere.

Enjoy the show!

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Any Formula 1 fans out there? Check out this Qlik Sense app which gives you the history of every race and where each competitor finished. And make sure to try out Qlik Sense for free at: qlik.de/datastories.

Links

Isabel Meirelles

Isabel’s Information Design Course

Isabel’s Book: Design for Information

Information+ Conference

Shneiderman’s Information Seeking Mantra

Tamara Munzner’s Design Studies Process Model

Gregor Aisch’s adaptation of Information Seeking Mantra to mobile screens:

mimi_square — **078 | Mimi Onuoha on Visualizing People's Lives through Mobile Data** Jul 14, 2016
Show notes

This week Mimi Onuoha joins Moritz on the show for a project episode from the Eyeo Festival. Mimi is a Brooklyn-based artist and researcher, and currently a Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute.

Mimi is fascinated by the moment when data get collected — by what can be captured in that moment, and what goes unseen. As a Fulbright-National Geographic Fellow, Mimi developed Pathways, a data storytelling project on a month’s worth of mobile data from a small group of Londoners. Using a quasi-ethnographic approach, the project reflects not only the individuals’ mobile metadata, but also their experiences becoming data subjects.

On the show, we discuss Mimi’s process recruiting both friends and strangers to become her data subjects, her experience developing personal relationships with each of them, and their reaction to the final product.

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Ever wondered what it costs to live in Singapore or Sydney? Check out the Qlik Sense app “Cost of Living” to answer that question and many others! And make sure to try out Qlik Sense for free at: qlik.de/datastories.

LINKS

Fulbright-National Geographic Fellowship

Data and Society Research Institute

Open Paths app

Moves app owned by Facebook

Reveal.js slideshow software

matt — **77 | Polygraph and The Journalist Engineer Matt Daniels** Jul 01, 2016
Show notes

We have Matt Daniels on the show, the “journalist engineer” behind Polygraph, a blog featuring beautiful journalistic pieces based on data. If you are not familiar with the site, stop now and take a look.

Matt starts with a simple question — for example, what songs from the ’90s are still popular? — and tries to answer it through data analysis and visualization. The result is always a well-crafted web page and applications, with a mix of data analysis, interactive graphics, and explanations.

On the show we talk specifically about two projects: “The most timeless songs of all-time,” in which Matt analyzes song popularity from Spotify data, and “Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age,” in which he examines movie dialogues as a way to dig deeper into gender biases in the film industry.

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by CartoDB. CartoDB is an open, powerful, and intuitive platform for discovering and predicting the key facts underlying the massive location data in our world. Whether you are a business, government agency, or simply a lover of revolutionary spatial insight technology, don’t settle for anything less than the best interactive maps around. Learn how CartoDB is shaping the world of location intelligence at cartodb.com/gallery and check out the Location Data Services mentioned in the ad.

LINKS

Matt Daniels
Matt’s Medium article “The Journalist Engineer”
Project: “The largest vocabulary in Hip Hop”
Project: “How music taste evolved”
Project: “The most timeless songs of all-time”
Project: “Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age”
Washington Post: “Doctors fire back at bad Yelp reviews — and reveal patients’ information online” (Collaboration between Enrico’s Lab and ProPublica)
Related episodes

Data Safaris w/ Benedikt Groß
Behind the Scenes of "What's Really Warming The World?" with the Bloomberg Team
Visualizing Your "Google Search History" with Lisa Charlotte Rost
Kim Albrecht on Untangling Tennis and the Cosmic Web
The Pudding with Matt Daniels

bc02cc9e6126c6278bc2f8e0f4aa8ea4 — **76 | Bocoup and OpenVis Conference** Jun 15, 2016
Show notes

On the show this week we have Irene Ros, Jim Vallandingham, and Yannick Assogba from the data visualization team of Bocoup. We talk about how they collaborate with other groups to create open-source data visualization software. We also talk about OpenVis Conference, the successful and innovative visualization event they organize each year, as well as the cool visualization projects they develop internally.

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by CartoDB. CartoDB is an open, powerful, and intuitive platform for discovering and predicting the key facts underlying the massive location data in our world. Whether you are a business, government agency, or simply a lover of revolutionary spatial insight technology, don’t settle for anything less than the best interactive maps around. Learn how CartoDB is shaping the world of location intelligence at cartodb.com/gallery.

LINKS
Irene Ros
Jim Vallandingham
Yannick Assogba
Voyager (Exploratory Visualization Tool from IDL)
Lyra (Chart Building Tool from IDL)
Bocoup’s self-commissioned project “Stereotropes”
Bocoup’s educational initiatives
OpenVis Conference 2015
OpenVis Conference Video Archive
OpenVis Conference file of transcripts
Contact the OpenVis Conference team
Lisa Charlotte Rost’s blog posts “One Chart, Twelve Tools” and “One Chart, Twelve Charting Libraries”

Related episodes

Jeff Heer on Merging Industry and Research with the Interactive Data Lab
Information+ Conference Review

91a6b6635db6e086bf785a1a49ab83f1 — **76 | Bocoup and OpenVis Conference** Jun 15, 2016
Show notes

On the show this week we have Irene Ros, Jim Vallandingham, and Yannick Assogba from the data visualization team of Bocoup. We talk about how they collaborate with other groups to create open-source data visualization software. We also talk about OpenVis Conference, the successful and innovative visualization event they organize each year, as well as the cool visualization projects they develop internally.

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by CartoDB. CartoDB is an open, powerful, and intuitive platform for discovering and predicting the key facts underlying the massive location data in our world. Whether you are a business, government agency, or simply a lover of revolutionary spatial insight technology, don’t settle for anything less than the best interactive maps around. Learn how CartoDB is shaping the world of location intelligence at cartodb.com/gallery.

LINKS
Irene Ros
Jim Vallandingham
Yannick Assogba
Voyager (Exploratory Visualization Tool from IDL)
Lyra (Chart Building Tool from IDL)
Bocoup’s self-commissioned project “Stereotropes”
Bocoup’s educational initiatives
OpenVis Conference 2015
OpenVis Conference Video Archive
OpenVis Conference file of transcripts
Contact the OpenVis Conference team
Lisa Charlotte Rost’s blog posts “One Chart, Twelve Tools” and “One Chart, Twelve Charting Libraries”

Related episodes

Jeff Heer on Merging Industry and Research with the Interactive Data Lab
Information+ Conference Review

SCOTT_HUGHES_2 — **75 | Listening to Data From Space with Scott Hughes** Jun 01, 2016
Show notes

Dear friends, we are really excited to publish our first “data sonification” episode ever! After many years of searching for the right person, subject and format, we are happy to publish this fantastic episode with Scott Hughes from MIT. Scott is an astrophysicist and a key figure at LIGO, the laser interferometer project that finally allowed scientists to “listen” to the sound of two colliding black holes.

Here Scott talks about how he decided to sonify his data and how sonification is being used by scientists to understand astrophysical phenomena.

Listen as we play a number of samples; Scott walks us through their meaning and the physics behind them. It’s really really cool. Warm up your ears!

You can also listen to some samples from Scott Hughes and his team here:

Simulation of two black holes orbiting each other. They gradually spiral together. As they move closer, the waves sweep up in frequency and amplitude, producing the “chirp.”

Simulation of a final collision of two massive black holes, what Scott calls “the ringing mode” of a black hole. All that is audible is the last “pop” of the system settling down to a single black hole.http://datastori.es/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/m100.mp3

Two objects moving past each other in space. The gravitational waves in this case are loud when the small body moves close to the large body (its motion is fast during that part of the orbit), and they are quiet when the small body is far away (when its motion is slow).http://datastori.es/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/e0.95_i20.wav

Also, take a look at the many links that we have added below. You can listen to the sounds yourself and discover a number of additional sonification projects.

Huge thanks to Scott for spending so much time with us preparing the sounds and recording the show. We loved it!

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by CartoDB. CartoDB is an open, powerful, and intuitive platform for discovering and predicting the key facts underlying the massive location data in our world. Whether you are a business, government agency, or simply a lover of revolutionary spatial insight technology, don’t settle for anything less than the best interactive maps around. Learn how CartoDB is shaping the world of location intelligence at cartodb.com/gallery.

LINKS

Scott’s website

Scott’s group’s web archive of sound files and discussion

*The Atlantic* on Scott’s work: What Gravitational Waves Sound Like

Video of the LIGO Gravitational Wave Chirp

The LIGO site (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory)

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration

Soundcloud of LIGO Gravitational Waves Announcement Chirp

Catalog of example sonifications of gravitational wave signals

Listen to Wikipedia project

The *New York Times*’s Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical

NPR’s U.S. Home Prices, Sung as Opera

*Medium* on What Does Data Sound Like?

Youtube video of what different sorting algorithms sound like

Related episodes

Data Visualization Accessibility with Sarah Fossheim

074 | Data Ethics and Privacy with Eleanor Saitta May 18, 2016

Show notes

saitta-headshot-2014-front-color-683x1024

We have Eleanor Saitta on the show to talk about data privacy. Eleanor is “a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian.” She is also Etsy’s new Security Architect.

During our chat we discuss the fine line between the excitement of being able to work with great data sets and the many — oftentimes unexpected — privacy risks associated with it.

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Make sure to check out the data visualization mapping tutorial on the Qlik Blog. You can try out Qlik Sense for free at: qlik.de/datastories.

LINKS

Eleanor Saitta
Journal of Spatial Science: “Tagging Banksy: using geographic profiling to identify a modern art mystery”
More on Banksy: “Mystery Solved? Scientists Reveal Banksy’s Identity” and “These researchers tracked Banksy like a serial killer to reveal his identity”
Medium: “Deanonymizing BuzzFeed’s Tennis Exposé”
The Atlantic: “When Fitbit Is the Expert Witness”
Connecting Grassroots and Government for Disaster Response: when choosing between privacy and control, there’s no easy answer
From Columbia University: “Location Data on Two Apps Enough to Identify Someone, Says Study“
W&L Law Review: “Elements of a New Ethical Framework for Big Data Research”
Markets for Good: “The Trials and Tribulations of Data Visualization for Good”

Related episodes

073 | Kim Albrecht on Untangling Tennis and the Cosmic Web May 04, 2016

Show notes

Kim is a visualization researcher and information designer. He currently works at the Center for Complex Network Research, the lab led by famous network physicist László Barabási.

Kim works in a team of scientists to create effective and beautiful visualizations that explain complex scientific phenomena.

In the show we focus on Untangling Tennis, a data visualization project aimed at explaining the relationship between popularity and athletic performance. We also talk about his more recent project, the Cosmic Web, which visualizes 24,000 galaxies and their network of gravitational relationships.

Enjoy the show!

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Make sure to check out the blog post listing Visualization Advocate Patrik Lundblad’s favorite data visualization pioneers. You can try out Qlik Sense for free at qlik.de/datastories.

LINKS

Kim Albrecht
Untangling Tennis
The Cosmic Web
D3.js
three.js, a javascript library for 3D vis
Ben Shneiderman’s The New ABC of Research
Peter Galison‘s Image and Logic
Peter Galison’s “Images Scatter Into Data, Data Gathers Into Images”

Related episodes

072 | Jeff Heer on Merging Industry and Research with the Interactive Data Lab Apr 20, 2016

Show notes

Jeff Heer is Associate Professor at the University of Washington where he leads the Interactive Data Lab (IDL). Jeff has worked on many visualization libraries and software programs, including Prefuse, Flare, Protovis and the widely adopted D3 (with his former PhD student Mike Bostock). Jeff is also the co-founder of Trifacta, a data analytics company focused on data wrangling.

On the show we talk about many interesting research tools and products developed in Jeff’s lab, including Vega, Voyager and Lyra. We also talk about Trifacta and the challenges and promises of visualization research.

Enjoy the show!

Data Stories is brought to you by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Let your instincts lead the way to create personalized visualizations and dynamic dashboards with Qlik Sense, which you can download for free at www.qlik.de/datastories. Make sure to check out their post on truth & beauty (!) at the Qlik blog.

Related episodes

71 | Tapestry Conference Review with Robert Kosara Apr 06, 2016

Show notes

Hey guys, this is a special edition from Tapestry, the conference on Data Storytelling that brings together visualization experts, journalists, designers, NGOs, academics, and more.

Enrico sits down with Robert Kosara to recap the conference, especially the keynotes and some of the short story talks. Plus, Robert fills us in on how to participate in Tapestry conferences in the future.

Enjoy the show!

Links

Scott Klein
Jessica Hullman
Nick Sousanis
Catherine Madden
Alan Smith
Eva Galanes-Rosenbaum
RevEx (Review Explorer) – Tool from Enrico’s lab
Tapestry YouTube Channel

The transcript for this episode is available here.

Data Stories is brought to you by Qlik, which allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Download Qlik Sense for free at http://www.qlik.de/datastories. For all Quantified Selfers, a senior member of Qlik’s Demo Team, Michael Anthony, has published his 2015 “My Life In Data” Report, where he tracks life events including miles run, coffees consumed, commuting mileage, food eaten and more!

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