Data visualizations: Using data to explain the world around us
- May 19, 2011 · 7:00 PM
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Boston Globe
Ben Fry, who is principal of Fathom, a design and software consultancy in Boston, is a co-developer of Processing, an open source programming environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive media software. The software won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. The project also received the 2005 Interactive Design prize from the Tokyo Type Director's Club. In 2007, Casey Reas and Fry published Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists with MIT Press, and in 2010, they published Getting Started with Processingwith O'Reilly and MAKE. Processing 1.0 was released in November 2008, and is used by tens of thousands of people every week.
He received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edythe L. Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard. During the 2006-2007 school year, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. At the end of 2007, he finished writing Visualizing Data for O'Reilly.
Glenn McDonald is the designer and product manager for Needle (www.needlebase.com), ITA Software's graph database and platform for data collection, collation, curation, exploration, analysis and republishing. He is also the court statistician for heavy metal, and a caped data vigilante. He believes that data is important, and that computers can and should be tools for people to make sense out of what they supposedly know. ITA and Needlebase were recently acquired by Google.
Daigo Fujiwara, an infographics designer for the Boston Globe/boston.com, was born and grew up in Japan. He came to Massachusetts as a high school foreign exchanging student and as a baseball fanatic, found himself right at home with Red Sox Nation right at home. He has also worked at the Christian Science Monitor, Inc Magazine and FastCompany Magazine.
Plenty of parking & access from the Red Line. (It's a 5 min walk from the JFK/UMass stop.)
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A former member
I'm a graphic designer and map maker, not a hack or hacker. The presentations at this meet-up made my jaw drop. I'm completely energized and inspired and I can't wait for the next meetup. Thanks for a great evening.
May 20, 2011
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glenn mcdonald
For those interested in data-curation processes, and/or the particular example of Needle use I talked about at this session, I also did a blog post with some more detail about the collection/correction/analysis steps involved: http://www.needlebase.com/blog/...
.Also, although I'd be thrilled to have more journalists using Needle, my philosophical "sales pitch" is really for the idea that data journalism should aspire to *demonstrate* insights, not just relate them.
May 20, 2011
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Cynthia
Great examples. Engaging Panel. I wish there was a handout covering the techniques, tools, and processes they used to create their work. Or, even a case study that users can use as as reference. I love this topic, and I hope there's a follow-up/ hands-on workshop.
May 20, 2011
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Lenni Armstrong
This meeting was SO fascinating, fun & just plain enjoyable! Thanks so much to all the organizers, presenters, and attendees!
May 20, 2011
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A former member
I found the presentations to be very interesting. I would love to know how someone like me (without programming or web designing skills) could learn how to do data analytics and research to create data visualization results like the ones we saw. I just wish there were more presentations. I could've stayed for another hour seeing more data visualization charts.
May 20, 2011
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fransansalone
Always interesting to see others' data visualization approaches and outputs.
May 20, 2011
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Matt MacDonald
This is probably on me but I was expecting something a bit different from the evening. It wasn't clear to me that the format of the evening was a 3 person lecture and then a Q&A session with the speakers.
I am somewhat familiar with the tools and material being used and while it was good to get a quick in-person overview (if somewhat of a sales pitch) of Needle, the presentations and Q&A seemed like material that I could mostly glean from some googling and surfing.
My hope for the evening was that the format would be setup to meet and mix with other hacks/hackers with similar interests about how to team up on projects/ideas and help each other better learn tools and processes. While there were people that hung around afterward I would have enjoyed a bit more structure around the mixing process.
I hope at future events to open an editor show code, see code and ask questions of others with more experience in hopes of improving my skills and efforts.
Thanks,
MattMay 20, 2011
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Sharon Machlis
*Very* interested in the topic and would enjoy hearing from the presenters. Still unsure of my availability that week, but will attend if I can.
April 6, 2011
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