065 | What Happened in Vis in 2015? Year Review with Andy Kirk and Robert Kosara

Data Stories

Hey yo!

Another turn of the year is approaching and we take some time to reflect with our classic guests Andy Kirk and Robert Kosara on what has happened in 2015: “What where the major trends? Big debates? Best visualizations? New tools? Etc.” We’ve even put our predictions in writing — you can read them in our transcript of this episode here.

This was a great year for Data Stories, with a total of 22 episodes (our record so far!). We want to thank our fantastic collaborators Destry and Florian for their great support with running the show, our guests for spending time talking with us, and of course all of you for listening to Data Stories!

Happy 2016! Enjoy the holidays and we’ll see you on January with a ton of new stuff from our side. Stay tuned!

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Data Stories is brought to you by Qlik, who allows you to explore the hidden relationships within your data that lead to meaningful insights. Check out a new blog post from the Qlik Blog called “People Are Smart: Data Literacy and Broad Audiences”. As you may know Data Literacy is a subject we love to talk about!

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Major Trends Of 2015

Cartogram, NPR

1. Cartograms, gridded maps (Collection of links in first item here, Hexmaps, London map, Bear map)
2. Machine learning / image processing, etc. (e.g. use of satellite images)
3. 3D and VR (NYT Cardboard Experiment)
4. Better storytelling
5. Data podcasts
6. Mobile vis

Major Debates/Issues

Design/Redesign

• Vis ethics: debate on aesthetizing negative data — and Sarah Slobin’s recommendations
• Data visualization criticism – Design/redesign article
• The Stephen Few / Alberto Cairo / David Mccandleuss debate
• Stephen Few’s Visualization research a pseudoscience
• Dogmatic rules vs. flexibility

Great New Visualizations

understanding neural networks through deep visualization

• Dear Data
  • Hear our episode with Dear Data
• Pace of social change
• 100 years of Tax Brackets
• Draw how family income affects children’s college chances
• Visualization of what neural networks see “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks” and “Understanding Neural Networks Through Deep Visualization”
• What’s really warming the world?
• Network effect
• Seagull sky trails
• What Happens When the Fed Raises Rates, In One Rube Goldberg Machine

Research/Academic Developments

CONNECTED SCATTER PLOT STUDY BY HAROZ, KOSARA AND FRANCONERI

• Papers on presentation-related topics (ISOTYPE, Connected Scatterplot, Bar chart embellishments)
  • ISOTYPE: http://steveharoz.com/research/isotype/
  • Connected Scatterplot: http://steveharoz.com/research/connected_scatterplot/
  • Bar chart Embellishments: http://kosara.net/papers/2015/Skau-EuroVis-2015.pdf

• Enrico’s deceiving vis paper at CHI
• Borkin et al. on Memorability at VIS
  • Hear our episode on the IEEE VIS ’15 Conference
• Seeing Data – Visualisation Literacy
• How do People Make Sense of Unfamiliar Visualization? A Grounded Model of Novice’s Information Visualization Sensemaking by Sukwon Lee, Sung-Hee Kim, Ya-Hsin Hung, Heidi Lam, Youn-ah Kang, and Ji Soo Yi

• Personal visualization: e.g. http://hcitang.org/papers/2015-tvcg-pva.pdf and http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/cg/preprint/07106391.pdf

Notable People, Companies, Studios

Domestic Data streamers

• Bostock leaving NYT, Shan Carter, the rising star of Gregor Aisch
• Chad Skelton leaving Vancouver Sun
• Notable appointments at FT (Alan Smith OBE)

• London: After the flood, Signal/Noise, Tekja
• Domestic Data Streamers
  • Hear our episode on Domestic Data Streamers

New Books

• Tamara Munzner, Visualization Analysis and Design
  • Hear our episode with Tamara Munzner
• Stephanie Evergreen, Presenting Data Effectively: Communicating Your Findings for Maximum Impact
• Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling with Data

New titles coming up:

• Andy Kirk’s new book “Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data-Driven Design”, May 2016
• Alberto Cairo’s new book “The Truthful Art”
  • Hear our episode with Alberto Cairo and Robert Kosara
• Dear Data book (September 2016)

Blogs

visualising data BLOG

• This guy Andy’s website (Kantar Information Is Beautiful Award)
• Visual Complexity – 10 years! 1000 projects!
• Reddit AMAs (Alberto, Tamara, Robert, Nate Silver, Hadley Wickham, David McCandless, Nathan Yau, Mike Bostock)
• Eagereyes (not new but still awesome)
• Flowingdata

Podcasts

• PolicyViz
• Data Skeptic
• Tableau Wannabe Podcast

Software / Libraries / Tools

VOYAGER VISUALIZATION TOOL DEVELOPED AT IDL FROM UW

• Vizable
• The end of Many Eyes
• Vega, Vegalite, etc. vs. D3
• Brunel
• Voyager and related tools
• Trifacta Data Wrangling tool
• React.js
• Mapzen, CartoDB, Mapbox

Events and specific talks

What was your highlight?

• OpenVis Conference
• Visualized
• resonate
• art+bits
• Tapestry
• Loops talk by Lena Groeger

What’s next in 2016? Wishes?

• Our expectations from last year’s edition

Happy New Year Everyone!

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Related episodes

• Data Vis Around the World in 2016

Chapters

1. Outtakes (00:00:00)

2. Qlik ad (00:00:30)

http://qlik.de/datastories

3. Hello and welcome to our guests (00:01:30)

4. The year for data stories (00:02:05)

5. Major trends (00:04:30)

6. Big debates (00:14:00)

7. Visualizations of note (00:23:00)

8. Academic Developments (00:28:04)

9. Qlik ad (00:37:28)

http://qlik.de/datastories

10. People, Companies, Studios (00:39:36)

11. Books (00:42:20)

12. Blogs (00:49:15)

13. Podcasts (00:56:20)

14. Software, libraries, and tools (00:58:00)

15. Events and talks (01:05:30)

16. Predictions for 2016 (01:09:50)

17. Qlik ad (01:15:55)

http://qlik.de/datastories