Announcements

• Visualizar Showcase Officially Opened at Medialab

  December 10, 2007 to Announcements  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  The Visualizar Showcase is officially open and ready for public viewing, so if you're in Madrid (and I'm about 80% sure you will be) from now until January 5, 2008 check out the projects spawned from two weeks of hard work. You can find a complete list of the projects at the Visualizar website, but here are a few of my favorites in no particular order.

  Mail Garden

  

  Mail Garden, from Kjen Wilkens, explores emails under a garden metaphor with the implication that our email is in someway living (like all data). In the visualization, emails exist as plants and as you scroll over you can read each email. The best part of of Mail Garden though is probably when you're not using it. When the system is idle, you can watch your plants (your emails) gently sway back and forth in the wind.

  TweetPad

  

  As if Twitter weren't playful enough, TweetPad, by Elie Zananiri, is a visualization that lets you playfully explore the live Twitter feed. Elie's main interest was in word interaction, and you can see that clearly in the TweetPad. Move the cursor clockwise for synonyms, back and forth to shuffle words, and counter clockwise to revert back to the original tweet all the while the Twitter feed is coming at you live.

  Spamology

  

  This visualization, as you might have guessed, explores one of the most popular canned meats in the world. No, just kidding. Spamology, by Irad Lee, explores email spam. The visualization is nice as you explore the small and giant buildings of spam, but it's the sound accompaniment that really makes it. Sound corresponds to the height of each spam building. Usually, pieces like this end up sounding like noise, but this was more like beautiful music.

  Now before I cover every work, which I'm a little tempted to do, I'll stop here. If you happen to be in Madrid, Spain, go check it out. If you read this blog, you're more than likely to enjoy the projects on display at the Medialab... or you can watch it on the news. Visualizar was also featured on some news show in Madrid. Be patient. The segment on the workshop comes some time around ten and a half minutes.

• A Few More Days Left at Visualizar

  November 26, 2007 to Announcements  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  I feel like it's been forever since my last post, so I just wanted to let everyone know that I am not dead.

  It's the last few days here at Visualizar so I've got a couple of late nights ahead to make sure we get our project done, and on Wednesday, we set things up for the one-month exhibition. That should be fun. It'll be especially nice to see everyone else's work out on display.

  The most interesting part about this workshop has probably been working and talking to designers about data visualization. I'm a statistician. Everyone else is a designer of some sort. With a statistics background and just coming off my New York Times internship, it felt really strange for the first week to go from the very literal and straightforward representation of data to the artsy, metaphorical data visualizations.

  The defining moment -- when I saw a huge difference between designers and statisticians' views on visualization -- was what followed after a talk from someone from the GapMinder foundation.

  I'll get into all of this stuff I've learned once I return to the lovely United States of America. In the meantime though, there was short blurb about the Visualizar workshop on We Make Money Not Art. There's a picture of my back. I'm famous.

  Oh, and if you're really bored, the MediaLab has a Flickr stream. They've been taking tons of photos.

• My First Couple of Days in Madrid

  November 16, 2007 to Announcements  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  It's been a couple of days here in Madrid. It's about 6:00am in the morning and I really should get back to bed. I'm incredibly jet lagged though, so that's not really an option. The past couple of nights I've woken up at 4:30am and have had trouble falling back asleep. Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm very much a night person and always wake up late, so obviously, I've been feeling a little off the past couple of days.

  Anyways, the past couple of days have been interesting. I flew in on Wednesday, and was extremely tired. I only slept maybe an hour on the plane. Once I came in, I got lost for several hours looking for the hostel and then the Medialab. That was fun.

  I've joined this group of three graphic designers / media artists. We're dealing with a good bit of migration data in a project now known as Humanflows, and a good bit of data means a lot of Statistics fun.

  ...

  Um...

  Loopdee loo...

  OK, I'm finding myself in a bit of a daze at the moment, so I think I'll pause it here, and resume a coherent thought later...

  Have a good weekend :)

  On a completely unrelated note, I just had real hot chocolate for the first time. I mean, it was like melted chocolate with cream. Delicious.

• Headed to Spain for the Visualizar Workshop

  November 9, 2007 to Announcements  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  When people I know can't decide whether or not go to graduate school, I always encourage them to do so, because cool stuff like this happens. First I get to intern at The New York Times and now I'm headed to Madrid, Spain for two weeks to attend the Visualizar workshop. As you might have guessed, it's a visualization workshop, and it's headed by Benjamin Fry, Bestiario and Adrian Holovaty. I'm not sure who Bestiario and Adrian (although I will soon), but Ben is most recently known, or I guess most widely known for his work on Processing with Casey Reas.

  There are ten projects, of which one I think I will be collaborating on. I'm not really sure how it's going to work yet. Unfortunately I'm going to miss the conference part of Visualizar, because I couldn't get to Spain soon enough on such short notice. I'm headed back to Buffalo on Monday (I'm in Los Angeles for the week) and then my flight to Spain is on Tuesday.

  Sorry in Advance

  Sorry in advance as my posts on FlowingData become a little sporadic during these two weeks, but I'll be sure to write about the goings on in Spain while I'm there. I'm pretty sure it's going to be really interesting and extremely educational.

• Join Eco-Viz Challenges to Raise Environmental Awareness

  November 1, 2007 to Announcements  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Eyebeam, an art and technology research center, has posted two eco-viz challenges to get artists and technologists thinking about data visualization and the role it plays in raising environmental awareness. The first challenge is to create an eco-icon that signals something about the environment. It might be displayed as a sign or on a cell phone. The second challenge is to create an eco-viz that focuses on a data set and displays the data in a novel way.

  This is exactly why eco-viz has become so important. Consumers (myself included) don't know how they're wasting resources and the effect they're having on the environment. All consumers know is that the longer they leave the lights on or the higher they turn up the heat, the more money they have to pay at the end of the month. If consumers are consistently wasteful, then a high bill won't seem that unusual. A few more dollars per month isn't enough to get someone to turn the thermostat down a few degrees.

  As Peter B. Crabb put it in Control of Energy-depleting Behavior (1992)

  [P]eople do not use energy; they use devices and products. How devices and products are designed determines how we use them, which in turn determines rates of energy depletion.

  The deadline for the eco-icon challenge is coming up soon -- November 5. There's more time until the eco-viz deadline -- December 8.

  [via EcoViz]

• World Visualization Day (Really)

  October 23, 2007 to Announcements  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  I thought Robert was just thinking out loud when he wrote his post on World Visualization Day, but I was apparently wrong. There's now a simple World Visualization Day site, a World Visualization Day Facebook group, and a first pass at a logo.

  World Visualization Day aims to take visualization out of the ivory tower of academia and bring it to the people. On one day of the year (which still needs to be decided), there will be events throughout the world for the general public to become aware of the power and usefulness of visualization, and to learn how to use it.

  I think this is an excellent idea. Nobody outside of the field seems to have a clue about what visualization is. It's always funny to talk to my mom about what I do. Despite all the nodding and mm hmm-ing, I know it's all completely over her head.

  It gets even worse when I start talking to people about Statistics. The eyes glaze over, and I just know they're not even listening. Nobody seems to know what Statistics is outside of sports figures and standard deviation. "If I were doing what you were doing, I'd be a sports statistician." Sure that'd be cool, but you know, there's more to Statistics than the number of touchdowns Randy Moss has scored this season (It's 10 by the way. He's my top fantasy football player :).

  What about a World Statistics Day?

  I'm tempted to ask for a World Statistics Day, but what would that even involve? A bunch of results from analyses? Theory? Algorithms? It would probably end up looking a lot like a World Visualization Day. Statistics results always seem to be more compelling when accompanied by some sexy visualization.

  Nevermind. I'm getting off-topic. So yeah, World Visualization Day, check it out. It'd be fun to see all of the world's top information and data visualists (?) putting together pieces to show everyone what visualization really is.

• Social Data Analysis Workshop

  October 12, 2007 to Announcements  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  I stumbled across the Social Data Analysis workshop, happening as part of CHI 2008. It is being organized by none other than IBM Visual Communication Lab's Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas in addition to UC Berkeley's Jeffrey Heer and Maneesh Agrawala.

  The goals of this workshop are to:

  • Bring together, for the first time, the social data analysis community
  • Examine the design of social data analysis sites today
  • Discuss the role that visualizations play in social data analysis
  • Explore how users are utilizing the various sites that allow them to exchange data-based insights

  We seek researchers and practitioners whose work explores social data analysis and/or social uses of visualizations. We hope for a lively mix of people actively involved in building sites and academics who study the dynamics of social software.

  The workshop happens during CHI, April 5-10, and you need to submit a 2-4 page position paper by October 31, 2007. Oh and by the way, it's in Florence, Italy. Not too shabby.

• ProBlogger Birthday Bash Giveaway

  October 3, 2007 to Contests  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  If you have a blog, I'm sure you've heard of the the ever so popular ProBlogger blog. To celebrate, Darren is giving away $54,000 worth of prizes! The current giveaway is for two 20-inch USB monitors, and all you have to do is post about the giveaway (hence this post :). They're going to have a random drawing some time Friday night. If you don't need the monitor, there's a whole lot of other cool stuff being given away in the next few days.

  At the Times, I got used to using a super sexy Apple high resolution wide screen to create graphics, but back at home I've just been using my laptop and a not-so-hot 1280p 19-inch LCD screen. It's true what they say about productivity and screen real estate -- especially with visualization. I sure wouldn't mind having these two 20-inch monitors.

• StatGrad Discussion Board Now Open

  October 1, 2007 to Announcements  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  The StatGrad discussion board is now online -- a place where stat students can hang out.

  One of the things I miss most about going to school is hanging out with my cohort. I work from home in Buffalo, and I get bored and restless pretty easily. When I was at school and feeling restless, I could just go down to the stat lounge, sit on the ridiculous-looking Ikea couch, and relax with some classmates. We never sat around and talked about probability theory or the law of large numbers (ok, maybe we did sometimes), but because we were all stat students, we all had this data-ish way of thinking. Know what I mean?

  That's what I'm hoping for StatGrad. I'm not interested in finding help for specific stat problems or trying to answer R questions. There are plenty of books and online resources for that type of stuff. I'm just hoping that StatGrad can become a place where stat grad students can hang out when they're bored. Complain about undergrads, discuss anything interesting happening in our field, look for job opportunities, and stay up to date on calls for papers.

  Join StatGrad now. I know you want to. Please? Come on, I'm bored.

• West Coast Stata Users Group, Oct. 25

  September 17, 2007 to Announcements  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  For those interested in or who already use Stata, the first Stata users group on the west coast is coming up on October 25-26. It's $150 for both days and of course students get a good discount at only $50. I'm an R user myself, but to each his own.

  Stata Users Group meetings started in Britain in 1995 and have spread to Italy, Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Australia, and the East Coast. Talks are intended to be accessible to a general audience with mixed levels of expertise in Stata and statistics. Stata developers will also attend, both to present new Stata features and to take notes during the popular “Wishes and grumbles” session. We hope you will consider joining the meeting as a presenter or an attendee.