Data Vis Talks: Explorable Explanations

Hey ho everyone, let's talk about explorable explanations at this very first data vis meetup in 2018! We start the year with speakers we're very excited about. Maarten is even coming from Belgium to Berlin just for this meetup! So let's gather, talk about data vis and have a drink or two. These are the speakers this time:

Maarten Lambrechts
Maarten Lambrechts (https://www.twitter.com/maartenzam, http://www.maartenlambrechts.com/ ) is a data journalist and visualisation consultant from Belgium. He has a background in bio-engineering and agricultural economy, but stumbled into data journalism years ago. He worked at Belgian newspaper De Tijd until the end of 2016, since then he is working as a freelancer.

Maarten also manages the Explorable Explanations Twitter account (https://twitter.com/explorables ). At the Meetup he will demonstrate and explain the power of Explorable Explanations, talk a bit about the Explorable Explanations “movement” and briefly introduce some tools to make Explorable Explanations.

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Jack Schaedler
Fumbling but Fascinating; Reflections on "Circles, Sines, and Signals" Three years ago I published "Seeing Circles, Sines, and Signals", a strange text that incorporated dozens of bespoke explorable explanations and animations. Omar Rizwan characterized it (along with two other similar texts) as "Preliminary, fumbling, but fascinating"[1]. In this talk, with the benefit of hindsight, I'd like to unpack and elaborate on Rizwan's characterization. I will discuss some successful aspects of the piece, reflect on some fumbling failures of design and execution, and generally share my "lessons learned" as an amateur author of explorables.

This talk should be interesting for anyone interested in the topic of explorable explanations, and should be helpful for those of you that are looking to create your own.

[1] "Bring on the Real Computer Revolution", Omar Rizwan.

Jack works as a software developer at Ableton, creating tools and educational materials for musicians. His personal projects investigate the nature of the dynamic medium in the form of web-based explorable explanations and playful creative software.

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Dirk Brockmann
Dirk Brockmann is a physicist and professor for complex systems in the Dept. of Biology at Humboldt University of Berlin, and researcher at the Robert Koch Institute. His research focuses on the dynamics of contagion processes, network driven dynamical systems, human mobility,
computational social sciences, and the emergence of cooperation in microbiological communities. He pioneered the use of mass data collected on the internet to quantify aspects of human behavior. In 2006 he discovered scaling laws in human mobility using data on the geographic circulation of banknotes in the US collected on www.wheresgeorge.com.
In his research and his teaching he is exploring alternative ways to communicate scientific content. Especially in his teaching he is exploring the use of interactive, web-based tools to illustrate mechanisms and concepts. (http://rocs.hu-berlin.de , @DirkBrockmann ) He is a lousy designer and a lousy programmer.

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