Data Stories

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...

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...