Music Videos in R

We have a busy month this April (more details on that later) and first up will be Thomas Levine and Brian Abelson discussing data audiozation (not sure if that's a real word but it works). A brief abstract is below.

Data visualization is an important part of traditional data analysis processes. With the rise of big data, however, our use of vision is becoming a bottleneck in our interpretation of data. We need new approaches to help us make sense of the newly complex information.

Music videos are an effective way of presenting high-dimensional data inside of a web browser. By broadcasting to multiple human senses over time, music videos allow us to represent many variables at once.

R's vector drawing paradigm, powerful plotting functions, numerous graphics devices, and csvsoundsystem library make it an ideal choice for the production of music videos. Tom and Brian will show us how they created two music videos in R.

Here are the two videos they'll discuss.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLZDvXPIDa0
• http://fms.csvsoundsystem.com/ (Only works in Chrome)

## Brian (brianabelson.com (http://brianabelson.com/))

Brian's a statistician, journalist, and hacker. He's currently a 2013 Mozilla-Knight OpenNews fellow at the New York Times where he's developing methods for measuring impact in journalism. Before that he was a data scientist at the Harmony Institute, a non profit dedicated to measuring the influence of socially-driven media. He recently graduated with a MA in Applied Statistics from Columbia University where he focused on quantitative and computational approaches to social science. On the side, he edited a book for a prominent political scientist, participated in hackathons, and worked on investigative news stories. Brian is also the co-founder of csv soundsystem (csvsoundsystem.com (http://csvsoundsystem.com/)), a hacker collective and datathon dream-team based in New York.

## Thomas (thomaslevine.com (http://thomaslevine.com/))

Thomas has been studying statistics and ergonomics since he was young, and computers since he was younger. This combination apparently makes him a data scientist. These days, he helps small organizations collect, manage and use data more effectively. He previously did data science/engineering at Scraperwiki, a website on which people write scripts to retrieve, clean, and analyze data sets. Last year, Thomas was named a "data hero" by DataKind for his superpowers. When he finds the time, Thomas studies how people use toilets, prints pretty things on letterpress, analyzes data about his hometown and runs various social experiments on his friends. His favorite color is pink.

Pizza begins at 6:15, Thom and Brian go on at 7 followed by a trip to the bar.

Silas Merez from Random House will be sponsoring this meetup as a thank you for the employees he found through the group.