A New York-based Data Visualization Meetup
We are designers, statisticians, analysts, programmers, mathematicians, data architects, start-up execs, content specialists, and data enthusiasts from many backgrounds. Together, we explore a wide range of possibilities for converting raw data into visible, shareable insights.
Visit our Meetup page or follow us on Twitter for updates.
Upcoming Events
The meetup will return after a fall break.
The Vault
Archive of content from past presentations
Making sense of scales in graphs
Jean-luc Doumont unpacks the questions and considerations involved when choosing the right scales in your data visualizations
Research Through the Practice of Visualization Design
Professor Miriah Meyer will discuss design study—a type of inquiry grounded in visualization design practice — and the variety of research contributions that emerge from it, from new visualization techniques to novel design methods.
Visualizing with Text - New ways to think about text and visualization
Some of the biggest societal challenges today are related to text: fake news, phishing emails, social media disinformation, and so on. Yet, text can sometimes be an afterthought in visualization. Richard's new book, Visualizing with Text, tackles the role of text and visualization.
Closing the Great Data Literacy Gap
We live in a world in which many of us struggle to speak the language of data. Learn about what we need to do to enable people with relevant, foundational data skills to drive the use of data and build a data culture in our businesses and in our societies.
Visualizing Uncertainty for Better Inferences from Data
While guidelines dictate how to choose visual encodings and metaphors to support accurate perception, it is less obvious how to design visualizations that encourage rational decisions and inference. Jessica Hullman discusses several challenges that must be overcome to support effective reasoning with visualizations, and describe visualizations and interactive mechanisms that can help.
Applying Racial Equity Awareness in Data Visualization
How can we take a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) perspective to our research, data, and visualizations? Dr. Jonathan Schwabish discusses a variety of techniques that data visualization producers should consider when creating visuals with this DEI approach.
Dataviz lessons from the pandemic
The greatest dataset of our lifetime is embarrassingly simple and small: it reports the number of daily positive cases and deaths by Covid-19. Jorge Camoes argues that the pandemic forced us to take a look behind the scenes, and realized the importance of data cleaning, clear concepts, statistical and subject data expertise, and find ways to communicate a complex reality.
Meet Our Members - Four Short Talks
Four talks from Anthony "AJ" Starks, Jonathan Martel, Matthias Brendler, and Paul Blankley. Topics include historical data visualization, guidelines for data visualization reporting, a 20-foot-wide data wall, and a no-code visual data exploration startup.
High-dimensional data visualisation with tours
By looking at a smoothly interpolated sequence of projections (this is called a tour) we can understand structures beyond 2D and learn about shapes in the high-dimensional space. Dr. Ursula Laa introduces these concepts and demonstrates them with examples, before showing how she has used tour methods in her physics research.
How to Avoid Some Common Graphical Mistakes
This talk discusses some common mistakes with graphs and tables. We end with some useful little-known graph forms that communicate the data more clearly than the everyday graphs that are more commonly used.
Tools for testing if what you see in plots is really there
Di Cook describes the tools in the nullabor package that allow you to check that what you see in a plot is really there. These include drawing samples from different null distributions and making lineups for the data plot, computing p-values and power, and measuring differences in plots numerically.
Maps That Move - Animating Spatial Data
How can data visualization provide geographic and temporal context to the complex systems and phenomena which shape our world? Will Geary explores this question through a series of data animation projects. This talk introduces the creative and technical process behind animating large datasets using Processing, a graphics library for Java.
The business case for data visualization - Real people + Real data
How and why do professionals incorporate data visualization into their practice? Based on her latest book, Data Visualization Made Simple: Insights into Becoming Visual, Dr. Kristen Sosulski presents the business case for data visualization.
Visualization Landscape and Grammar of Graphics
Lee Medoff takes us on a journey through the data visualization landscape, and Ganes Kesari introduces the concept of a grammar of graphics.
Visualizing Data in the Life Sciences
Scott Chasalow discusses data visualization in Translational Bioinformatics and Isaac M. Neuhaus talks about canvasXpress, an R Library for Interactive Data Visualization and Reproducible Research.
Financial Data Visualization
Joanna Kao and Julie Rodriguez discuss visualizing financial data.
Meet our Members - Seven Short Talks
Talks about statistical graphics, data art, static graphs and interactive ones.
Outsmart and Out-Chart Excel
Jon Peltier shows how to commandeer regular Excel chart elements, plus custom formatting and data layouts, to add features to charts and even chart types that Excel doesn't ordinarily make available.
Historical development of W.E.B. Du Bois’ graphical narrative
The Paris World’s fair of 1900 included “The Exhibit of American Negroes” organized by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, whose stated goal was to show African-Americans’ positive contributions to American society. The exhibit included 58 statistical graphics that wove in facts about African-Americans produced by Du Bois. This presentation traces the history of graphic displays to help place Du Bois’ contribution in context.
From confusion to clarity, via humor
"What I've learned from 50 years of trying to explain a variety of things (some of them pretty complicated) to a variety of audiences." -- Nigel Holmes
The Visualization of Deaths in The New York Times
Our decision-making is heavily informed by readable stories with powerful narratives - not always thoughtful risk assessments. Nemil Dalal examines the coverage of deaths in The New York Times and its impact on readers using data, charts, and interactive visualizations to explore the coverage of deaths.
Nine visualisation challenges
Hadley Wickham discusses nine visualisation challenges, illustrating the problems and some solutions with ggplot2
The Forgotten History of Data Visualization in News
You may think that data journalism is a 21st Century phenomenon, but you'd be off by a few hundred years. Scott Klein shows examples of data-rich stories, charts, maps, and more from newspapers from the 17th century to the early 20th, and talks about how the development of data visualization traces the history of journalism.
Understanding Patterns of Mass Violence with Data and Statistics
Statistical patterns in data tend to reflect how the data were collected rather than changes in the real-world phenomena data purport to represent. The talk shows how biases in raw data can be addressed through estimation, and explain why it matters using analyses of killings in Iraq, homicides committed by police in the US, killings in the conflict in Syria, and homicides in Colombia.
Vizanda - Building and Sharing Interactive Data Visualizations
What if you could build and share an interactive data visualization with someone in seconds and empower them to answer follow-up questions totally on their own? Vizanda is a new startup that makes interactively visualizing data fast and easy. Greg McDonald discusses how Vizanda compares to other data visualization tools in the market.
Geospatial Story Telling and The NYC Space/Time Directory
Nikolai Janakiev tells a story through collected geospatial data during my stay in New York City. The project explores different ways he visualized collected gps data combined with public geospatial data to form a visual story. Bert Spaan and Mauricio Giraldo talk about how the NYC Space/Time Directory will make urban history accessible through the kinds of interactive, location-aware tools used to navigate modern cityscapes.
"Don't mention the election!" - Adventures in presenting data
How can visualisation be used to inform debate and decision-making? How do organisational perspectives affect what's possible? This talk covers visualisation examples and case studies, from the perspective of a speaker whose career has spanned both the world of official statistics and the newsroom.
Depicting Details - More Insights with Data Dense Visualizations
Many visualizations today roll up all the data into representations that summarize data resulting in loss of detail. In contrast, Richard Brath discusses visualization techniques that depict more of the underlying data to reveal insights that may be otherwise overlooked. Techniques will include directly plotting millions to billions of data points; as well as augmenting familiar representations with additional visual layers of data, such as text analytics.
Visualizing Health Data and Polyglot Visualization with the Beaker Notebook
David Haddad, Executive Director of Open mHealth, discusses how their team was able to create data visualizations through an app called Linq, that could be used to deliver care management for cardiovascular patients. Scott Draves talks about polyglot visualization with the Beaker Notebook.
Projects in Urban Data Visualization and Sports Analytics
In this talk, Claudio Silva describes some projects in urban data visualization and sports analytics. In particular, he will describe Urbane, a 3D framework to support data driven decision making in urban development, and the Baseball Metrics Engine, which is part of MLB.com's Statcast.
IBCS - Designing reports, dashboards and presentations
The International Business Communication Standards (IBCS) are the world’s first proposal for a standardized design of business communication. The key features of IBCS are presented through real-world examples.
What I Learned from Ten Years as a Datavis Critic
Everyone has an opinion about graphs and charts. “That’s beautiful!” “That’s misleading!” But few people have precise language to describe what they like or don’t like about data visualization. Drawing on eight years producing the Junk Charts blog, Kaiser Fung has developed the Trifecta Checkup framework for appreciating data graphics.
Representing Data for Human Observers
Using examples from financial risk analysis, cardiac modeling, and data mining, Bernice Rogowitz demonstrates how the application of insights from the study of color perception, perceptual scaling and visual attention can help guide your visualization choices.
Visualization as Intelligence Amplification
Enrico Bertini discusses the role of visualization in both research and society and some of the challenges of visualization.
Making Data + Design, an open source e-book
Trina Chiasson talks about the process of writing a collaborative, global, open source book about the intersection of data and design.
An Introduction to ggvis, Plotly and Scaling Data Exploration with GPUs
Hadley Wickham introduces ggvis, Matt Sundquist introduces Plotly, and Leo Meyerovich describes how to run in-browser visualizations on massively parallel graphics processors (GPUs).
How to compare 300 million images
How to compare 300 million images? Lev Manovich discusses visualizing patterns in art, games, comics, cinema, web, print, and user-generated content, through a discussion of some of his recent projects involving large image and video collections.
"The Dialect Map"
Josh Katz, Graphics Editor at The New York Times, discusses one of his projects, the "Dialect Map." He discusses how spatial statistics, data visualization and information design all came together in this news media piece, plus just a little bit about the nature of News Viz at the Gray Lady.
Advanced R Visualization
This seminar will cover two areas related to data visualization with R. First, Professor John W. Emerson will introduce the generalized pairs plot. Second, he'll introduce two technologies for offering user-friendly exploration and visualization of data on the web.
Telling Stories with Data
Recently, there has been a lot of interest in storytelling about data, in particular because of the successful use of data in news media. Robert Kosara discusses what makes these work so well, and then look at how we can go from analysis to presentation, and on to building exploratory tools for the audience once they have seen the story.
DataViz Contests & Hacks Aplenty: NYC BigApps and About.com
Representatives from About.com and the NYC BigApps contest share their experience unleashing talented people on interesting data problems, and achieving notable results.
Lena Groeger of ProPublica & Bliksem Tobey of McKinsey Digital
Lena Groeger reviews some of her work and talks about how ProPublica tells visual data stories. Bliksem Tobey shares his perspective on designing application interfaces that rely heavily on living, dynamic data visualizations to enable effective decision-making
Visualized Conference Special Edition: Cedric Kiefer and Moritz Stefaer
Cedric Kiefer and Moritz Stefaner are in NYC for the Visualized conference! They'll be sharing about generative design and visualizing large-scale human activity.
Vizzual Inspiration & Intellectual Elucidation
Andrew Hill gives a talk titled "Data and the art of storytelling". Paul Trowbrdige discusses his current visualization strategies for a work-in-progress project, which analyzes repeated binary measurements from experimental data in psychology and behavioral economics.
Viz 4 Journalism & Clean Water Advocacy and NiJel
Gabriel Gianordoli discusses some of his data journalism projects, specifically focusing on the visualizations that were developed for main features. Lela Prashad and JD Godchaux, discuss data visualizations created through their organization NiJel, for Riverkeeper, an organization dedicated to restoring and protecting the Hudson River and the New York City Watershed from environmental lawbreakers.
R 2 JS: Hands-On with RCharts, Your Bridge From R to Interactive
Ramnath Vaidyanathan focuses on how R can be used to span the data-analysis-presentation workflow, from fetching data and analyzing it, to communicating the results on the web with interactive visualizations and controls.
Giorgia Lupi of Accurat & Ben Jones of Tableau Software
Giorgia Lupi speaks about Accurat, and their creative practice model. Ben Jones shows us how anybody can start with a basic dataset and leverage a tool like Tableau.
Challenges of small news graphics teams and the visualization of Likert Scales
Alberto Cairo presents: The Rise of the Rest: the beauty and challenges of small news graphics teams. Naomi Robbins and Richard Heiberger speak about the visualization of Likert Scales.
Andy Kirk & Edward Lee, from VisualisingData.com & Visualizing.org
Edward Lee discusses the process and outcomes from the data visualization competitions held by Visualizing.org. Andy Kirk delivers a talk entitled, 'Opposites Attract: The Art and Science of Data Visualisation'.
Data Visualization @ Yahoo! - Data Science and Business Perspectives
Genome from Yahoo! is the big data buying solution for online display advertising. The talk presents the data-driven visual analysis platform at Genome from Yahoo!.
Data Visualization With Web Standards
Andrew Trice and Siarhei Mardovich discuss data visualization with web standards and interactive/user-experience design with a HTML/CSS3/JS toolkit.
Critical Discussion of Statistical Graphics and Data Visualizations: Andrew Gelman and Jed Dougherty
Professor Andrew Gelman unpacks what does and doesn't work about statistical graphic displays. Jed Dougherty shares about the challenges and choices involved when building data visualizations for state foster care agencies.
An Evening of Data Visualization Presentations
Mark Daggett (interactive thought experiment around interface design), Oscar Villareal (live-coding an interactive data-driven SVG map), and Greg Irwin (BigTwist.com demo)
Designing Data Visualizations
This talk is about the process of visualization design--how to get from a blank page and a pile of data to a useful data visualization. The focus is on design process and not specific tools.