Visualising Data

Data visualisation training dates for Australia: Registration open!

Andy Kirk — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:27:03 +0000

After completing a logistics task comparable with the early Apollo missions, I have resolved my schedule for visiting Australia in November and can confirm the dates of my three training courses in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. Not just that, but registration is now open! Click on the EventBrite buttons below for the information and registration process.

Sydney	Friday 15th November
Canberra	Tuesday 19th November
Melbourne	Thursday 21st November

I am also hopeful of having details of each training venue soon and will update the information on each EventBrite event page accordingly. I will resolve all my other training plans (in the UK and US) as soon as possible – check out updates on my Training page.

Appreciating the critical role of subject matter

Andy Kirk — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 07:36:25 +0000

I have written in the past about the way those of us active in the field operate within something of an artificial environment. It is unavoidable and not unique to data visualisation but when your day is spent networking and communicating ideas largely just with other captive members of the discipline you do so within a bit of a bubble. This means you potentially miss out on important perspectives of people who would be self-defined as casual, occasional consumers or maybe just newly interested in visualisation work.

Likewise, when your vocation involves creating or digesting a wide range of visualisation work every day you view work through the lens of a designer or critic. It is not easy to revert to a neutral or default perspective. Like any profession, you are somewhat cursed by knowledge.

This means that I am very fortunate to run training sessions that provide me with a window to access insights from more casual observers (*). I see how people interact and perceive many different data visualisation and infographic works, from instinctive evaluations and through to more forensic design judgments.

One of the most interesting observations has been the significant influence a project’s subject matter has on people’s reactions. Works that I might celebrate as being great examples often provoke divided opinion across a group and frequently the connection between the reader and the subject matter is cited as a key reason for indifference.

This has made me think about my own consuming of visualisation work. Projects that I might share or profile are usually exhibits of my appreciation of a design concept or technical solution but I rarely consider the appeal of the work from the perspective of its subject matter.

A few examples. Firstly, this visualisation from last year about changes in wood dimensions. Technically, I think it is a superb piece of work. Extremely well conceived and executed, I included it in my top 10 developments of the time. Yet, if you were to ask me if I’d actually taken the time to learn anything about the subject matter I would have to concede ‘no’. I frankly have little interest in the subject matter and, as much as I might try, I’m never quite going to connect with it on that level.

On the other side of the fence, I have previously expressed my great fondness for this work on football match stories by Michael Deal. I think it is a superb concept to visually encode the key activities within a game and, to me, it reveals fascinating stories of ebb and flow in each encounter. But I am also a huge football fan and would happily spend far too much of my time digesting anything and everything to do with the sport. I know others would not, indeed they would be repelled at the prospect. So, once again, irrespective of the quality of the idea and the final visual, this will only reach a certain audience.

A final example: Snow Fall. (Not enough has been said about this, I know that’s what your thinking. Well here’s a little bit more analysis.) This isn’t an example of visualisation alone but as a form of contemporary digital storytelling was quickly picked up by and shared amongst this community.

The great swell of positive response to this project has been largely universal. But how many of us have actually read it all the way through? How many of us have actually read anything beyond the opening paragraph? I know very few who have – myself included – and yet we celebrate the work almost in terms of being a game-changer. That’s mainly because we readily judge it as a great artefact of story-telling design, rather than something we have read and been affected by it’s subject. (Incidentally, whilst I don’t necessarily agree with all the points made here this article is an interesting counter-perspective to the broad celebration of Snow Fall).

The point I’m making here is about appreciating limits of appeal. We can create the very best portrayal of data – elegant, attractive, interactive and different – and demonstrate attributes of effective design but we can never achieve perfection. We can never get everybody on board because there is always a subject matter involved and that will be something that ignites or dampens a reader’s desire to continue reading and discovering. We might work really, really hard to create something that achieves eyeballs on our work but soon the visual novelty will wear off for those who simply are not interested in the core topic.

The two key reminders for me:

As ever, an appreciation of your intended reader is key: a realistic view of who you are and are not aiming a project at will frame your design decisions as well as define your judgment of whether it succeeded or not.
Optimisation – doing our best within the context of what we can achieve – is a really important mindset to get into. You will never achieve 100% so don’t expect it and don’t suffer when you don’t reach it

(*) I am loathe to use terms like ‘normal’, ‘everyday’, ‘non-expert’ to categorise this cohort. There is no way to avoid sounding like a prat so hopefully you get what I mean by the clumsy descriptions I have used!

Announcing my planned training locations for Autumn 2013

Andy Kirk — Wed, 29 May 2013 11:41:12 +0000

Last month I invited those who might be interested to let me know of where in the world they would like me to arrange my ‘Introduction to Data Visualisation‘ training courses. At the time I was specifically interested in exploring options for India and Australia but any location is of course feasible depending on the volume of interest expressed.

I have had a lot of interest registered – thanks to all! – but certain locations jumped out as being significantly more popular. Accordingly, I am now in position to announce the following locations will form my Autumn 2013 schedule (between August and November):

London	Thursday 15th August		6 places left
London	Friday 16th August
Lisbon	September	Coming soon
Washington DC	October	Coming soon
New York City	October	Coming soon
Melbourne	November	Coming soon
Canberra	November	Coming soon
Sydney	November	Coming soon

Comments on schedule

Where a specific date is not provided, a provisional intended month is displayed – more details will be confirmed in due course. Should new locations emerge as being viable they will be added to the schedule.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to accommodate an event in New Zealand as part of my Australia tour, hopefully I’ll be back down under again next year! With regards to the possible Indian events, I have a few ideas/options to pursue on this front and will share updates as and when I have them.

Beyond the destinations listed above, there are plenty of additional locations that I’m looking to schedule in due course but can’t easily fit them in for 2013 so will likely be early/mid 2014. These include: Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Austin, Montreal, Frankfurt, and Buenos Aires as well as cities in India. I am also likely to add a couple more UK events but these can be arranged at much shorter notice.

Still don’t see a location that suits you? I am always looking for opportunities to deliver training courses in new places around the world. As I have stated, once I receive sufficient volume of requests for a certain location I will look to arrange an event there so send me an email with your name and desired location and I’ll add you to my ongoing list.

Private training events

Finally, another reminder that alongside the schedule of public events, I run bespoke, on-site, private training events for organisations. These are taking up a lot of my schedule this year and prove to be very enjoyable events to run. You can see a list of organisations for whom I have recently run on-site events. Once again, if you would like to enquire about arranging a bespoke event please contact me to discuss your requirements.

A reminder about following this site via RSS

Andy Kirk — Wed, 29 May 2013 08:23:45 +0000

As we approach June there is just a month to go until Google Reader is shut down so this is another reminder that if you follow me via RSS you will need to make some changes.

If you’ve not already done so, your first decision will be to choose a tool to replace the job of Google Reader. Many people have recommended – and I’ve followed – Feedly, which seems to be a great alternative with the added benefit of seamlessly transferring across your existing Reader subscriptions.

Once you have done that you will need to update the RSS feed URL for the Visualising Data post updates. I will be ceasing the existing Feedburner feed at the end of June. The new feed URL you will need to use is http://www.visualisingdata.com/?feed=rss.

Thanks very much for continuing to follow!

Best of the visualisation web… April 2013

Andy Kirk — Tue, 28 May 2013 09:05:10 +0000

At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. If you follow me on Twitter you will see many of these items shared as soon as I find them. Here’s the latest collection from April 2013.

Visualisations/Infographics

Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.

Information is Beautiful | Good use of venn diagram to explore the different strains of flu

CNN Money | Personal Space – How much space each person has in some of the world’s major cities

Berliner | Hopefully my translation stands up, I believe this is the flight paths and positions above the city of Berlin.

New York Times | Animated pixellated Venn diagram (yes, I made that up) to visualise the diseases that often overlap for the elderly

Moritz.Stefaner | Moritz explores the gender balance in the speaking line ups at conferences in visualisation and related fields

New York Times | Jonathan Corum’s animated project to illustrate ‘Kepler’s Tally of Planets’

Washington Post | Starting the mini-collection of coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, here’s the timeline of investigation from the WaPo…

New York Times | …the NYT’s ‘Hunt for the Boston Bombing Suspects’…

New York Times | …and their incredibly researched audio recordings of some of those involved…

Source | … A good collection of all the key ‘visual explanations’ about the marathon bombing from Erin Kissane on Source

Chesapeake Bay | Multi-faceted project to visualise the Chesapeake Bay Grasses

Distance To Mars | April seemed to be a month of visually portraying ‘big’ things: concepts, numbers, distances, populations but none of them worked for me, particularly in the browser where change blindness occurred. Anyway, a lot liked it out there so included for record…

hereistoday | …here’s another titled ‘here is today’

Northeastern University | ‘The Twitter of Babel’ – mapping world languages through language usage on Twitter

Vision of Humanity | Updated index of peace across US, UL and global Terrorism index (work by Scott Murray, amongst others)

Guardian US | ‘Violence and guns in best-selling video games’

Business Insider | Collection of work by Eric Fischer: ’21 Maps Of Highly Segregated Cities In America

CitiesInOneWord | Simple idea but I like it, describe a city in one word then see the perspective build up for each city. Not keen on the square word clouds though, more could have been done.

SFStreets | ‘A history of San Francisco Place Names’

Data Remixed | Another great demonstration of Ben’s Tableau skills, this time on baseball pitching

Information Aesthetics | ‘Where is the King? Live Crowd Visualization of Amsterdam’

skepchick | Nice investigation into the comparable ages of leading men and women in movies

Knight Center | ‘Journalists need to learn data visualization and infographic design skills to complement their message’ (When I saw the title I thought this is one for Alberto Cairo. Then I read that it was from the mouth of Alberto!)

Articles

The emphasis on these items is that they are less about visualisation images and are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse and interviews

Eager Eyes | In ‘The Revolution Will Be Visualized’ Robert discusses the recent deployment of visualisation for particularly emotive subject matter

Peachpit | Similar theme… Alberto Cairo’s post about ‘Emotional Data Visualization: Periscopic’s “U.S. Gun Deaths” and the Challenge of Uncertainty’

Michael Babwahsingh | Michael discusses ‘New Modalities of Understanding’

Augify | Another similar theme… ‘Designing understanding: Our obsession with visualization stems from our understanding of humans as visual beings’

Well-Formed Data | Moritz triggers an interesting series of discussions and responses about the concept of storytelling with data visualisation and specifically the ideas that every good visualisation has to tell a story.

Nick Diakopoulos | ‘Storytelling with Data: What Are the Impacts on the Audience?’

Weather.AOL | ‘NASA’s Robert Simmon on Transforming Science Into Art’

Harvard Business Review | From the HBR series on visualisation, great piece by Irene Ros/Adam Hyland ‘When Creating Visualizations, Question Everything’

Stories Through Data | Super post by Chris Twigg exploring ‘The reader and reading data visualisation’

Scientific American | Interesting to learn about the science behind the different reactions of reading paper versus screens

Eager Eyes | Useful primer about the different between continuous and categorical data…

Eager Eyes | …and another good piece from Robert about continuous values and baselines

BBC News | Deepwater Horizon: Surviving the oil spill – interactive video

VisualLoop | ‘Talking with… Paolo Ciuccarelli: A fantastic conversation with one of the minds behind Density Design’

Density Design | ‘Information Visualization on the Move. A Brief and Initial Overview’

Pacific Standard | ‘Creatures of Coherence: Why We’re So Obsessed With Causation’

jnd | Preface: ‘Design of Everyday Things, Revised Edition’

The Functional Art | ‘Making your message visible: Trend lines in scatter plots’

Perceptual Edge | Stephen Few asks, and answers, ‘what makes a chart boring?’

Social Media Week | On the subject of gender balance: ‘Announcing Gender 50/50: Striving for Balance Among Social Media Week’s Global Community of Men and Women’

Four Four Two | ‘Bayern 4-0 Barcelona: The story in Stats Zone screens’

Stephen Wolfram | Stephen Wolfram’s long form analysis of the world of Facebook

BBC R&D Blog | ‘Visualising near-real-time iPlayer usage data’

Perceptual Edge | Stephen proposes an interesting new concept for encoding values in geospatial displays using ‘bricks’…

Perceptual Edge | …with a noble follow up to concede concern for certain shortcomings…

Infodez | …and Francis Gagnon puts in a great effort to conceive a further alternative using concentric circles and to convince (or otherwise) Mr Few of its merits!

Learning & Development

These links cover tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.

GraphicsInfo | Process narrative behind the SCMP’s ‘Picasso’s Painting’s infographic

Postgraphics | Behind the scenes narrative of the Dow 30 tax burden graphic

Peltier Tech Services | Jon describes a workaround/tutorial for creating dot plots in Excel

The Why Axis | Guest post from Jon Schwabish describing a tutorial to create a chart remake in Excel

Charts’n'Things | Design process behind the NYT’s graphic about baseball strikeouts being on the rise

Juice Analytics | Data Storytelling: The Ultimate Collection of Resources

Tapestry | The collection of videos of the talks at Tapestry conference

Case.Grafix | Analysis of the SCMP graphic about the Kowloon Walled City

School of Data | Presentation video and slides, ‘Data visualization guidelines’ by Gregor Aisch at the International Journalism Festival

Charts’n'Things | Second entry this month, another great process narrative about the NFL draft interactive graphic

Vimeo | Video of Bret Victor’s talk titled ‘Stop Drawing Dead Fish’

Subject News

Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.

GitHub | Newly released Vega providing a ‘higher-level visualization specification language on top of D3′

Simon Rogers | Simon Rogers announces his leaving of the Guardian and move over to Twitter

Kevin Schaul | Hexagons are all the rage right now, here’s a command line tool to ‘better visualize crowded dot density’

ICIDS 2013 | Call for papers for the ‘The 6th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling’

gmunk | Perhaps off-topic slightly but a fascinating collection of Bradley G Munkowitz’s work, over a decade, as a Design Director for the motion graphics industry

Stories Through Data | Storytelling and Data Visualisation – interview with Amanda Cox

Guardian Data Blog | ‘Doing good with data: why Datakind is launching in the UK’

Random…

Tableau Public | Data Art in it’s purist sense: Andy Cotgreave creates a Kraken out of arranged bubbles using Tableau Public.

Twitter | “What Twitter will look like on the day that Thatcher dies”

YouTube | Video showing how the Opta team harvest data from football matches on match day

+Labs | Hyperlapse video of Google Street View images around the world

New York Times | Not from our friends in the graphics dept. but the worst graphics you’ll see in the NYT…

Timo Elliott | Introducing ‘Data Visualization? Bling It On!’ (note the post date, before you go any further)

FastCo Design | ‘An Introduction To The Internet From 1995′

Cool Infographics | ’8 New Punctuation Marks We Need’

Guardian | Just an inspirational article about creativity, discipline, passion, perseverence. James Rhodes: ‘Find what you love and let it kill you’

FastCo Design | ‘An Ingenious Cookbook Uses Infographics Instead Of Words’

HortiViz? Twitter-fed digital garden wins gold

Andy Kirk — Sat, 25 May 2013 14:06:27 +0000

Earlier this week I mused about an accidental fusion between music and visualisation. This comes on the back of other pieces about smells and visualisation and the possibility of taste and visualisation. Now we find a new collaborative concept in the shape of gardening and visualisation, or HortiViz if you like (or more likely, don’t like).

Conceived by academics at the University of Lincoln and designers Harfleet & Harfleet, the ‘Digital Capabilities‘ project is a twitter-activity-driven exhibit at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show and came away with a gold medal.

I’m no gardener so I’ll let the project’s creators explain the concept:

The plot is divided diagonally by an electronic panelled screen that separates the planting into two distinct areas, one visible and one concealed. The visible area is a tapestry of familiar plants, including soft green shades and creamy-coloured flowers with a touch of pink and a zing of citrus. Foliage adds texture and movement. The partially obscured planting beyond the panelled screen offers a dramatic contrast, with less familiar, stout-stemmed plants and large, rich green leaves creating a dark and exotic effect.

When Tweets discussing the RHS Chelsea Flower Show or Digital Capabilities are detected, the panelled screen activates, permitting selected views of the concealed garden. The planting represents the world of the internet, moderated and revealed by our desire for knowledge and interaction. The garden highlights the contrasts between analogue/digital, material/immaterial, familiar/unfamiliar and global/local.

OK, maybe the connection with visualisation is slightly tenuous but it’s all good fun. There is far more information, videos and photos on the project’s site.

Article for the OECD Better Life Index blog

Andy Kirk — Fri, 24 May 2013 07:25:38 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote a short article for the OECD’s Better Life Index blog and it was just published yesterday.

It’s not a groundbreaking piece of work but frames a discussion about the success of the Better Life Index project that many of you will already be familiar with. It has been slightly edited but not too far from the original (not sure where the image came from but I quite like it).

Thanks to Laura for inviting me to do the piece!

Kepler Funk: An accidental meeting of music and visualisation

Andy Kirk — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:55:00 +0000

I was hard at work this morning preparing for a variety of things and it just so happened that I had Jonathan Corum’s ‘Kepler’s Tally of Planets‘ work on my screen and BBC Radio 6Music playing in the background. By chance, on came the Daft Punk track ‘Get Lucky‘ and suddenly Jonathan’s planets were dancing.

The fusion between music and visualisation is something that I’ve been interested in for a while now, primarily in an atmospheric sense. In the way that audio in a movie adds to the emotion and sense of story, I’ve been wondering what impact musical accompaniements to visualisations might have, particularly interactive/animated ones.

For DRM reasons I can’t publish the iMovie re-enactment I started making but you can recreate the experience yourself by playing both these YouTube videos together.

I have started to formulate some ideas for my next generation of talks around this concept and the fusion between Hint FM’s ‘Wind Map‘ and Debussy’s ‘Claire de Lune‘ was another I felt worked (keep replaying to the Wind Map video to get full effect of the entire musical track).

So, which mashups do you think would work?

Talk slides: NYC data visualisation meetup

Andy Kirk — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:25:03 +0000

Last night I had the privilege of talking at the New York Data Visualisation meetup event, hosted by the good people at McKinsey (thanks to Christian and Paul for organising). This was based on a similar talk I gave in London last week as part of the ‘IDA talks‘ series (thanks to Beth for inviting me).

The talk was titled ‘Opposites Attract: The Art and Science of Data Visualisation‘. I’ve trimmed some of the more superfluous intro slides in order to get the file size down and compatible with SlideShare. Please note this is not a slide-based document so some of the content may mot make sense without having the context and narrative provided at the event.

Andy kirk NYC Data Visualization Meetup from Andy Kirk

Thanks in advance for viewing!

Frank Lampard’s 203 goals visualised in 3D by Adidas

Andy Kirk — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:09:34 +0000

To mark the scoring of a record number of goals for his club, Adidas have celebrated Frank Lampard’s 203 strike with a real-life 3D visualisation of where each of these goals were scored from.

I like how they’ve combined the penalties he’s scored in to a stack.

And here’s the ‘normal’ visualisation.

It pains me to celebrate anything to do with said player or said club so let me feel better about life by congratulating Rafa Benitez on getting the best out of Lampard.