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

We are recapping the year in data visualization with Andy Kirk and Robert Kosara — what were the biggest trends, the biggest misses, and what do we expect for 2016?

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!

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!

Most popular episodes

Data Stories #56: Amanda Cox on Working With R, NYT Projects, Favorite Data
Data Stories #52: Science Communication at SciAm w/ Jen Christiansen
Data Stories #57: Visualizing Human Development w/ Max Roser[a]

Major Trends Of 2015

Cartogram, NPR

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

Related episodes

Data Vis Around the World in 2016