Data Stories

Happy New Year everyone, we are back!

In this episode we talk with Ben Wellington about his blog I Quant NY, where he writes about surprising facts he finds analyzing NYC open data.

Some of his stories include how he discovered that “... Software in Half of NYC Cabs Generates $5.2 Million a Year in Extra Tips,” ideas on “How to Fix NYC’s No-Cabs-At-4PM Problem” and “How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year” by detecting fire hydrants that generate too many parking tickets.

On the show Ben talks about how he generates new ideas, how he finds and analyzes the data, and how he turns this into amazing stories for his blog. We also talk about the impact his work had on New York City and the interesting reactions some of his blog posts have generated.

Enjoy Ben and his amazing NYC data stories, and read a transcript of our interview here!

This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Quadrigram, a web based application designed to bring data stories to life. With Quadrigram you can create and share interactive data stories without the need of any coding skills.

LINKS

Moritz’s project on place names – http://truth-and-beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/

Our Guest Ben Wellington – https://about.me/benwellington

I Quant NY – http://iquantny.tumblr.com

Some favorite I Quant NY posts:

• “You’ll Never Guess the Cleanest Fast Food Joint in NYC”
• “Half of Manhattan is Within 4 Blocks of a Starbucks”
• “How Software in Half of NYC Cabs Generates $5.2 Million a Year in Extra Tips”
• “How to Fix NYC’s No-Cabs-At-4PM Problem”
• “Success: How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year”

Tools Ben uses for I Quant NY:

• iPython: http://ipython.org/
• iPython Notebook Pandas: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/tutorials.html
• QGIS: http://www.qgis.org/en/site/
• CartoDB: https://cartodb.com/

We have Jarke Van Wijk on the show this week. Jarke is a professor of visualization in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology and an important historical figure (shall we say legend?) in visualization research.

Many amazing innovative techniques have been developed in his lab, including the widely adopted squarified treemaps (treemaps optimized to use rectangles as close as possible to squares) and hierarchical edge bundling (a technique to bundle the links of a graph together).

In this episode we hear the stories behind many of the innovations developed by Jarke and his group. Jarke also speaks to us about how to make cool stuff; the relationship between design, engineering and research; and artistry in visualization.

Enjoy the show!

Data Stories is brought to you by Qlik. Are you missing out on meaningful relationships hidden in your data? Unlock the whole story with Qlik Sense through personalized visualizations and dynamic dashboards which you can download for free at qlik.de/datastories.

Links

• Jarke Van Wijk Website
• Eagereyes guest post: Jarke ‘Jack’ Van Wijk’s List of Influences
• Paper: “The Value of Visualization” (2005)
• Jarke’s VIS 2013 Capstone (video)
• Martin Wattenberg’s Map of the Market
• Treevis.net: A Visual Biography of Tree Visualization
• Unfolding the Earth: Myriahedral Projections
• YouTube video of Unfolding the Earth: Myriahedral Projections

[Help us fund Data Stories by donating on Patreon! We’re counting on you to switch to a crowdfunding model. Please visit our Patreon page for more details!]

We have Tamara Munzner from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and Robert Kosara from Tableau Research on the show to go through some of our personal highlights from the IEEE Visualization Conference 2019. We talk about some of the co-located events, some of the technical papers and major trends observed this year. Make sure to take a look at the links below, there is a lot of material! And especially the videos. There are quite a few that have been posted online this year.

Enjoy the show!

[Our podcast is fully listener-supported. That’s why you don’t have to listen to ads! Please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon or sending us a one-time donation through Paypal. And thank you!]

LINKS:

Main IEEE VIS conference website

Events: Infovis X Vision science
Mentioned speakers: Timothy Brady, Darko Odic, Jeremy Wolfe

Visualization for Communication workshop: VisComm

BioVis@Vis workshopMentioned speakers: Martin Karpefors, Sean Hanlon, Erin Pleasance

Visualization in Data ScienceMentioned speakers: Been Kim, Google Brain, Andrew Gelman, Jenny Bryan

Technical Papers – The Test of Time

Jark J. van Wijk et al.: Cluster and Calendar based Visualization of Time Series Data

Tamara Munzner: A Nested Model for Visualization Design and Validation

Reflections and provocations

Miriah Meyer, Jason Dykes: Criteria for Rigor in Visualization Design Study
Paper / Video

Arvind Satyanarayan et al.: Critical Reflections on Visualization Authoring Systems

Jagoda Walny et al.: Data Changes Everything: Challenges and Opportunities in Data Visualization Design Handoff

Evanthia Dimara, Charles Perin: What is Interaction for Data Visualization?

Visual perception and cognition
Robert Kosara: Evidence for Area as the Primary Visual Cue in Pie Charts

Jessica Hullman: Why Authors Don’t Visualize Uncertainty

Cindy Xiong et al.: Biased Average Position Estimates in Line and Bar Graphs: Underestimation, Overestimation, and Perceptual Pull

Visualisation for machine learning

The What-If Tool

Àngel Alexander Cabrera: FairVis: Visual Analytics for Discovering Intersectional Bias in Ma...

Finally, this year we managed to record another classic episode from the IEEE VIS Conference (we recorded a total of 10 with this one!) We have Data Stories’ friend Prof. Tamara Munzner with us to talk about the conference and to highlight a few things she picked from the many events that happened over this week-long event.

Links

• IEEE Vis ’22
• Our guest: Tamara Munzner
• VIS Keynote: Marti Hearst – Show It or Tell It?
• VIS Capstone: Kerry Magruder – Galileo’s Telescope Discoveries: Thinking Visually in the History of Science
• Keynote BELIV workshop: Casey Fiesler – Data Is People, Research Ethics Beyond Human Subjects
• VAST 10 Year Test of Time Award: Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study
• InfoVis 10 Year Test of Time Award: Design study methodology: Reflections from the trenches and the stacks
• Paper: HiTailor: Interactive Transformation and Visualization for Hierarchical Tabular Data
• Paper: Dashboard Design Patterns
• Book: AK Peters Visualization series
• Paper: VegaFusion: Automatic Server-Side Scaling for Interactive Vega Visualizations
• Paper: Plotly Resampler: Effective Visual Analytics for Large Time Series
• Paper: Visualizing Graph Neural Networks with CorGIE: Corresponding a Graph to Its Embedding
• alt.VIS workshop
• Jo Wood’s visual essay “Beyond the Walled Garden“
• Paper: Affective Learning Objectives for Communicative Visualizations

Related episodes

• from Visweek 2012
• IEEE VIS'13 Highlights w/ Robert Kosara
• IEEE VIS'14
• Tamara Munzner
• IEEE VIS’15 Recap with Robert Kosara and Johanna Fulda
• Highlights from IEEE VIS'16 with Jessica Hullman and Robert Kosara
• Review of IEEE VIS’17 with Jessica Hullman and Robert Kosara
• Highlights from IEEE VIS 2018
• Highlights from IEEE VIS'19 with Tamara Munzner and Robert Kosara
• Highlights from IEEE VIS'20 with Miriah Meyer and Danielle Szafir

Hey folks, we are back! We really hope you had a good summer.

We start the new season with an “internal” episode. We give numerous updates on Data Stories. Things have changed recently — we have future ideas and two great events to get in touch with us!

1. The Visualized Conference, taking place in New York on Oct 7-10, 2015, is going to host a Data Stories Meetup on Oct 7, 2015. If you live in NYC or happen to be around please drop by! We’d love to meet and talk with you.
2. We will also offer an Ask Me Anything on Reddit on November 3. This is a unique opportunity to ask us questions live and chat together.

In the show we also talk about some of our recent projects.

Moritz talks about False Positive, an art project on data, privacy and identity. He also talks about the new Inclusive Growth Report from the World Economic Forum, for which he designed the graphics and website together with Stefanie Posavec and 9elements.

Enrico talks about the RevEx tool and his collaboration with ProPublica for the analysis of millions of medical Yelp reviews, his work with Human Rights experts and a recently published paper on visualization design with climate scientists.

This episode is sponsored by Qlik who allows you to explore hidden relationships within data that lead to insights. Read Patrik Lundblad’s blog posts on the three pillars of data visualization(1,2,3). You can download Qlik Sense for free at: www.qlik.de/datastories.

LINKS

• John Swabisch’s PolicyViz Podcast
• Data Skeptic Podcast (Enrico’s favorite data podcast)
• List of Data Science Podcasts – “The 7 Best Data Science and Machine Learning Podcasts“
• Data Stories Meetup at Visualized in NYC (sign-up here!)
• Data Is Beautiful on Reddit (where our Ask Me Anything will happen)
• False Positive (Moritz’s project on personal data on the web)
• RevEx (Enrico’s project on analyzing healthcare reviews from Yelp)
• Inclusive Growth (Moritz’s project on visualizing growth)
• Upcoming Conferences: VIS’15 | Kikk Festival | art+bits festival