What Was Big in 2012 and What Is Coming in 2013

Okay.

Oh, now it says it's live, so you need to start again. I'm sorry, but it was great. I like the singing part.

Hi, everyone. Data store is number 60. And yeah, in the first episode in 2013. I'm Moritz. How are you?

Hi, Enrico. I'm super great.

We are again on the hangout. On the Google Hangout.

Yeah. Is it like, is it only me in the camera picture or is it you as well?

I think it's only me when I speak and then you when you speak and so on.

Is it like that? We don't want to mess up anything.

I can see it live. You know what happened the last time, right?

Exactly.

We had Benjamin all the time. Yeah, yeah. So we have another episode here, and we thought about having some guests to talk about what happened in 2012, the major developments in this, and what is gonna happen in 2015. What are the major trends, right?

We had Benjamin all the time. Yeah, yeah. So we have another episode here, and we thought about having some guests to talk about what happened in 2012, the major developments in this, and what is gonna happen in 2015. What are the major trends, right?

That's right.

So we have three fantastic guests. We have Andrew Vande Moere. I always have problems spelling your name. I'm sorry. I'm improving. How are you? From info statics? I don't know if I have to say that.

I think so, but, yeah, I'm fine.

We already had you. We had you recently on the podcast.

Yes, at the interview.

I think you are one of the few ones who was invited twice so far.

With this included.

With this included. Yeah.

Sorry for that.

Yeah.

Seems like you're not very happy about.

I don't know if it's good or bad.

Yeah, we're running out of good guests. I missed that.

Why did you ask him again?

Then we have Andy Kirk from visualizing data. Good evening.

Good evening. Very well, thank you. This is my third episode. Expect a prize. Is that right?

Wow. Prize. Yeah, you should. And.

Yeah, no, clearly.

And Andy's from visualizing data.com, i think. Did we mention.

Yeah, twice. That's good.

Okay. Visualizing with it. With an s, by the way, visualizing.

Very British, right?

That's right. Unless you talk about my book, which is Zed. That's a bit.

So, Andy, we started just a few minutes ago, and you're already advertising your stuff.

There must be a button to get rid of these types of people. Spam bots everywhere.

And then we have Brian Connor from the y axis. Hi, Brian. How are you?

Hello there, guys. This is my first episode.

But I.

Think you linked to me at least once before.

How is it going?

It's going well. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, you're welcome. It's great to have you on the. On this episode. So maybe this might be the first one of a long series, as the other guys hope so.

So we want to be prizes, Brian.

No prizes. No.

No prizes. I'm still waiting for the gift from Santa. Andy.

It's coming. Don't worry.

It's coming.

Okay. He's coming.

Okay, so we want to talk about major developments and trends in 2012 and in the future, 2013. So, Brian, maybe you want to start talking about what happened in 2012.

Sure. Yeah. I put together a little list of things, but one of the first things I saw was a really strong increase in a lot of, like, education and training around data visualization. And I think part of that comes from, you know, the training courses that Andy's been working on. Andy came to Baltimore and we looked at the course and we did. I took part in his course in Baltimore and. But there's a lot of other things, too. I've been working on a program at Mica, which is a master's program in information visualization. And there's also been Alberto Cairo's massive online course and data visualization, a couple other things, too. And so that's one strong trend. I've also seen interest in other areas, but nothing sort of developed yet. I've seen a little bit of interest from Lynda.com in doing some dataviz things, but nothing developed from that yet.

It's true.

It's true.

Education has been a big thing this year. And I hear some noise. Somebody has a cell phone or something.

Maybe that's me again. Also, I discovered I have to switch, actually, who's in the picture. So you do that manually.

Now you're the tv producer.

Yeah. So I'll keep it on me just for convenience.

But there should be a way to make it automatic.

I mean, it is automatic in your normal chat. But right now I think I'm controlling who's in the final recording, who's visible. So right now it's you, Enrico.

Okay, so anyway, yeah, but just so.

If I'm a bit, like, preoccupied, don't get confused. I have to change the camera.

At least this time it's on you. It's up to you.

But just. Just to pick up on Brian's opening point there. I think it's. From my perspective, it's been interesting to see the growth in people being interested in receiving training, not just in public courses, but also in organizational, private settings. You know, the sheer volume of signups on Alberto's course is quite staggering. I think he's probably reached the 5000 limit now for the next, the second course. And I think that's testament to probably just the general awareness of data visualization, just the sheer, I guess, recognition of what that term actually means. Now I think that's always been a barrier to the growth of the field, people just even knowing what the name is of what this discipline is. So I think that's, I would expect myself to see that grow in the next twelve months and beyond, really in terms of a key development. But I guess from my point of view, obviously I've done a couple of posts over the last year to summarize my own view of the top things that developed. And I think one of the standout trends has definitely been the take up of and development of D3, where I think it was maybe 18 months, two years now since it first came on the scene. And the explosion in usage, particularly over the last twelve months, I think has been staggering. And I guess the high profile appointment of Mike Bostock at the MIT has been a significant catalyst for that. But also the tutorials that you see from the likes of Scott Murray and Jerome and Jim. And there are a lot of people now sharing and creating a community around this programming environment that processing has had for 510 years. So I think that has really been a key trend. And some of the work that's going into D3 developments these days is fantastic.

So did any of you guys give a look to Alberto Cairo's online course.

Personally? No. Alberto suggested it wasn't necessarily for us as a demographic, but I mean, obviously for those who are new to the.

Subject, it's, I mean, just out of curiosity to see how he organized it and what kind of content he put there.

I think it was limited so you couldn't access it after a while. So I tried to get in, but. But then it was full already and the first one was just a few hundred people, I think. And now it's, it's thousand. So you're right, I missed it again. To sign up.

You really need a course, Moritz. You really need one.

Yeah. Need to brush up my feelings before. But no, but I think it would be really interesting in how he approaches.

It, especially from a purely introductory perspective as well. You know, how do you get people over that first obstacle of what is this subject? And all the different, as we've talked about in previous episodes, all the different subjects that converge into one? And that's not easy feat, really.

Yeah, absolutely.

But I'd like to second on the Mike Bostock at the D3 thing. So if I would have to pick a person in Infowars. Like, the biggest person would definitely be Mike this year. I mean, he's done fantastic work with the New York Times in the few months he's been there, really. And D3 alone is such a masterpiece. And as you say, it's growing. And it's not just centered around him, but there's like at least five or ten people who are really, really involved with the whole.

That's right. There's a pyramid developing and, you know, the inclusion or the launch of books. So we had Mike Dewar's book a few months ago, and now Scott's kind of going through the process of releasing a sort of beta version and a full published version. So, you know, that will only help people come into its usage. Really.

Interesting. Yeah.

I think it also has implications for something else that I pulled out was sort of, you know, the. I mean, obviously a big part of the D3 is the degree to which you can interact with the data itself and sort of play with it and transform it as a user. And I think that's sort of like another thing that I saw gain a lot of ground in the past year was partially because of D3, but just in general, sort of the user interface and sort of the experience of actually working with the data and maybe trying to explore some things within it itself.

Yeah, I mean, what's interesting for me coming from flash is these whole new workflows that you can have because it's svg. So you can export an svg, reopen it in illustrator and do some tweaking for print, or you can start with an illustrator file, load it into a web page, and then start to modify parts of the graphics. And for me, that's been the. I still haven't figured out what that actually means, but it's been quite interesting to work with that a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

And the demand for these integrated workflows, where you have an interactive visualization and print pieces produced out of that, that might link back, deep link into the interactive pieces. I've heard that so often, and it's now we are really getting closer there to have nice integrated workflows between print and interactive there. Oh, yeah, that's one of the predictions 2013 for me.

So we finished now, did we?

Yeah, I did my part.

Okay. So basically, big developments were education D3. What else?

I think the democratization now of the infographics, if you all know many eyes, that was called the democratization of dataviz. Everybody can visualize their own data. And now I made a list. I came to like already a big list we have revu visualize me visually. Venngage.

Sorry.

Visible easily an infogram, but I probably forgot a few which all to have some business plan on top of having people make so people can get to make their own infographics of their resume, of their social media data, of their gps running and everything like that. And that all happened in this year, I think, and a bit of lost here, which seems to be something. I mean, is it, do you think it's useful? Do you think it will be successful?

Well, just to pick up on that, I think that's an interesting observation because I think also from the perspective of being a blogger, I've seen a reduction in the amount of terrible graphics tower posters, infographics being requested for me to put on the site. And I've noticed there's been less kind of working their way around the bloggers fair and Twitter sphere. And I wonder if the.

You got a reduction of people emailing you for infographics?

Yeah.

Okay, I'll forward them to you then. I get about five per day.

I do think that, you know, a venue or a place, a platform such as visually in this last year is really kind of given that all these people, a place to home in on and publish these without having to go through, I guess, necessary blog editors in the traditional sense. So I think it's. I think it's kind of clear.

You mean there's ghettos now for these types of people?

There's an underground ghetto. That's right. Towers hang out. But I think we solved that problem. Well, there's themes of Batman there. But I think what's interesting, therefore, is it's allowed the better quality to emerge. And I've certainly picked out a few good quality infographics this year that really stood out where in the past they may have been clouded out from being visible by all this noise that we've seen. So, Percy speaking, going back to Andrew's question, I have not used, I don't think any of those tools particularly, but I have seen, you know, people use them and they do seem to have certainly got a market and a population out there that do require these tools. So, you know, you know, good for them. Hope they do well.

Yeah, it's also getting popular in other sense. And I noticed that people are using them in their PowerPoints. For instance, instead of having a picture of trees, when they talk about sustainability, they take an infographics. They're googled somewhere that says some sort of fact about sustainability. So it's, it's becoming like the new stock image for PowerPoints.

Interesting.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the word clouds are not, you cannot kill them anyway, so they have become part of any good PowerPoint presentation. Anyways, I got a few requests to do a few of these this year, so most of the time I could battle it, but I did one, I won't say for them. So more trends. How about academic trends?

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the word clouds are not, you cannot kill them anyway, so they have become part of any good PowerPoint presentation. Anyways, I got a few requests to do a few of these this year, so most of the time I could battle it, but I did one, I won't say for them. So more trends. How about academic trends?

Yeah, this is what I was going to mention. You know me well, Moritz, I think. No, I mean a connected trend. I think that very slowly researchers in academic set, academic settings are realizing that there are other aspects other than efficiency. And that's happening very slowly. But for instance, this year at this week at the this week conference, we had a couple or even more papers that were a little more focused on other aspects or even the idea of using visualization not only as a discovery or exploratory tool, but also as a communication tool. Because this is what is happening out of academia. People are basically using visualization as a way to communicate something. And there is a huge gap in terms of research about how to use visualization as a communication tool. And I have seen some little new pieces of research coming up and I think we are going to have more of this in the future.

And did that manifest itself for you, Enrico and Andrew, I think you were there as well in a more successful biz week.

Sorry, can you say it again?

Did that manifest itself into a more successful biz week from your perspectives?

You mean the last one? It's hard to tell, honestly, maybe I'm very biased, but this week for me is always great. So it's really hard to tell whether one is better than another. It's true that this year we had this year and last year we had a few papers that were really, really interesting and out of the normal way of, standard way of seeing at this. So for instance, this year we had a nice study, I saw a nice study about how to communicate, how to understand. How was it? Bayesian inference with visualization, which sounds like something complicated, but basically it's when you have to, when you have to visually communicate information about probabilities. There was a very interesting study that actually demonstrate, kind of demonstrated that visualization doesn't really help, but it's important. This kind of studies are really important. It's more complicated than that. But no, I mean, it's important to tell people when visualization doesn't help. Right? And why it doesn't help.

Yeah, but only afterwards, right?

Yeah, after.

No, but I mean the reason why I'm mentioning this study is more. Because the study is much more focused on using visualization as a communication tool. Right. Rather than discovery and exploration and that sense.

I remember a paper about where they were comparing different PowerPoint presentations about the same subject.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Whether people from a different academic background are communicating the same concept in a different visual way, which was quite interesting.

Yeah, exactly. And I think the other one I want to mention is from Andrew. He actually presented a paper where.

You.

Don't want to speak about that. It's okay.

It's okay.

I mean, no, really. I think it was a really nice piece of research. And again, a little unconventional compared to the stuff that people present there normally. And again, Andrew tried to set up a study to see what's the impact of aesthetics and in visualization. And again, I think it's a first interesting step that is. And it's one kind of study that doesn't necessarily focus on efficiency. Right. So we are little by little discovering that efficiency is important, but there are other aspects that come into place and which are also dependent on the context in which you put a given visualization. So a visualization doesn't exist in a vacuum. Right. So you cannot. You can never tell whether a visualization is good or bad unless you put it in a specific context. I don't know. Maybe you, Andrew, you want to add anything about something about that?

Yeah, well, that's sort of the thing I was. I'm trying to look for, but it's not very easy to kind of come up with a scientific way to do that. And, Erica, you tried as well?

I tried as well. It's really hard.

Yes, it's very hard to kind of prove, for instance, you say aesthetics, but I try to. Not to use the word, I try to say style because aesthetics, many people kind of different reactions to that, but I think it's correct what you say. So if you use visualization for communication and we see all these designers being very successful, why are they. Why are they successful? And what is success? You could say there's a number of hits that maybe also successful in other ways that common tools cannot do. So we're trying to find these kind of. What are these qualities that designers can bring in visualization? Because then maybe, you know, scientists will incorporate them if we have some numerical proof, for instance. Yeah, it's not an easy task.

Sure. Once again, I hear a strange noise. I'm sorry, I have a mobile phone. It must be a mobile phone from somebody. Okay, looks. It's better. So if I. If I have to predict something for 2013 or even 14. I think researchers will have to catch up with what has been happening in the, in the real world. I think right now we have a lot of development, a lot of development to using visualization for storytelling, communication, all these sorts of things. And research is not very well developed in this area. And my prediction is that it's going to be, we're going to see more and more studies in this direction. That's going to happen, I'm sure.

I also want to mention this. That was also a very popular topic this week. I think there were two papers, or three papers even.

Yeah.

About touchiness and adding more. It's an aesthetic style again, on top of a visualization. And people were researching how that could be useful, and that was kind of, seemed to be kind of giving a buzz to the whole room at this week. Not sure if that people will pick it up in 2013. And can you make it more useful than what was shown at the conference? Because it was not immediately obvious what it could be used for, but people were quite enthusiastic about it.

I think I also noticed that anything that brings back that human factor into data immediately resonates with people. And that could be graphical style or the way you think about data, like how much you bring it into people's lives or what type of data you use. That's, that's been a big thing last year, that also the handmade things like Natalie Miebach, Stephanie Posavec, like really handcrafting visualizations. The whole density design lab, you know, also has this, the work coming from there has this quality that it has been touched by a hand, you know, before it sort of leaves the press.

Yeah. And the stuff that goes on the way for doing.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that's, that's been quite a trend as well, that these, these very personal, handmade human things.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, the other thing is, you touched on it already briefly, is, of course, storytelling. So I think the years before, everybody was, like, talking about storytelling, and now people actually did it. I think it actually happened and people figure out how it works and.

Yeah, that's very true. I mean, it kind of goes away from being a buzzword and you can actually, you know, kind of like, see examples of it more and more.

Yeah.

And that's the thing I wanted to mention again, related to what I was saying is that I think that the development we will see in academia and out of academia is not only on studying how people. How people use visualization to communicate or how people perceive certain features or visualizations in a given context or whatever. It's also that I think we will see more and more technological development in this area and from research as well. So what I expect to see is researchers coming up with new tools or techniques to help people develop visualizations that are more targeted towards storytelling, communication, this kind of stuff.

So I wonder, Enrico, if from an academic perspective, you've seen anything or whether this would be related, kind of from a research perspective. But I've been seeing sort of like a lot of ties between data visualization and actually sort of like graphic novels or comic book design. And I wonder if there's a body of research sort of, around how storytelling works in those scenarios, and, you know, whether or not that could be applicable to data visualization.

Again, I think the way I see that, we are in a kind of situation where research has to catch up with what has been happening during the last year or so. And during our last episode, we, our last episode was with Robert Kosara. And I know he's been mentioning that he's doing research in storytelling at Tableau. And I'm sure they will be publishing stuff. I'm totally sure that they're going to publish stuff, either or even both in the area of user studies or new technological development. So for sure, 100%, we're going to see something out of this lab. But, you know, people are always looking what the others do. A consequence would be that other researchers will be focusing more on this area, because so far, very, very few researchers have been doing this kind of research. That's why I'm predicting then in one year or even two years, many more researchers will be focusing on this kind of stuff. But no, the answer is actually.

Oops, there he goes.

That was too controversial. I had to kick him out.

Somebody kicked him. The answer is actually.

The murderer walls.

But just to add to that, for the storytelling, I think there's quite a few more tools also now popping up that support. One I came across is called popcorn from Mozilla Labs, and it allows you just to put things in sequence, you know, and put a narrative behind them. You can sort of mix media and make exactly the thing that everybody's looking for is this sort of half interactive movie type thing. And one prediction for 2013, there will be more tools in this direction, because at the moment it's very hard to do nice narratives, animated narratives.

So would that be like the infographics tools that I mentioned before? If they make it more animated, would that be the similar thing, or would.

They still be different? I think it's a difference, in a sense, that what visually does is more like a template you can fill with your own data. It's like you pour your data in a pre made like thing, and popcorn is more like a movie maker or a tool that allows you to create your own.

But these things could be merged, probably.

Exactly. There's a middle ground.

Sure.

Absolutely. Hey, Enrico, you're still alive. That's great. Oh, but no sound. No sound. You have to unmute yourself, Enrico. You have to unmute yourself.

Yeah.

You have to click on.

Hey, good to see you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a network problem. I don't know.

You went to the kitchen.

In the middle of your seminar.

I think I'm having a network problem too, because my beer is getting lefty.

Just on that point of storytelling. Obviously, the. At the very end of the year, we had the fantastic project from the New York Times, the snowfall project, which was just incredible and innovative. And you can only expect that a lot of similar organizations will look to that as a blueprint, not to copy in the most blatant sense, but to be inspired as an approach such an immersive and multimedia piece is that. I mean, it was, you know, fantastic. And I'm sure most people started looking at it, probably saw it all the way through to the. To its conclusion, which is probably right from many projects that we see as well. So I think that.

Can you describe it a bit for those who haven't seen it?

It was a kind of a. Almost an episodic story about this. I mean, I have slept and I've had Christmas since I looked at it first time, so I can't remember all the details, but it was just this very immersive, multifaceted story. I think it was. A couple of people got lost in some really table snow, snowy conditions, and it had videos, it had text, it had interactive pieces, it had this kind of scrollable in screen story. And I think most people saw it just. Just love the kind of cohesiveness of it as well. It wasn't something that had a clumsy interruption from the video. It was just something that was so synthesized and well planned. If you look at the attributions, those who were involved, I mean, you have people from all sides of the New York Times, designers, developers, 3d artists, journalists. So just from the perspective, and obviously, Moritz, you'll be particularly kind of acutely aware of the challenge of working in a team of a lot of people with the work that you've done. Emoto, I imagine, you know, just to bring all those people together. And to create such a synthesized, integrated piece was kind of fantastic. Really?

Yeah. And I think the other thing about it is that it's a really long form piece, too. You know, it takes you a while to get through it, and they break it up with interaction, with video and kind of like, you know, give you breaks from it, but also just kind of make it, you know, like you said it, a seamless experience to get from a to b. I mean, there's not, you know, there's not a ton of visualization in it, but there is. I mean, there's obviously, like, the, you know, the different 3d renderings and then, of course, diagrams and things like that to kind of explain the story. So, I mean, I think they're, you know, it's a good starting point, obviously, for journalism and storytelling, but I think, you know, a visualization, you know, kind of heavy version of it could be exciting as well.

But I agree that this closed form it had, that was really what it was so impressive about. You wouldn't want to single out any single of these graphics, but there was such a cohesive experience, and you always scrolling down, just waiting for the next. What's the next chapter? What's the next part?

And it wasn't sandwiched in the New York Times normal sort of layout. It was kind of only about that piece. And you don't need to have a million sidebars and kind of different directions you can go in. It's sort of like the only other direction is kind of deeper into the story.

And, I mean, traditional journalists will sometimes say, you know, the graphics department, they want to make things simple and dump it down a bit, you know, and I think these features also prove that you can draw people into even much more complex stories, you know, if you have this nice media integration. And really, I wouldn't, I didn't read the whole article, but I read, like, three pages, which is, like, super much for me already because I do have attention span problems.

But I know for a fact that, I mean, it's still not the first time this has been done. And I know that Sarah slobbing from the Wall Street Journal tweeted some additional examples that were out there before this. But obviously, the profile of the New York Times kind of reached a larger audience, in our field, at least. But I think the other thing about storytelling, I think there's a great myth out there that there's some magic solution, but actually, essentially, at its most basic level, it's just taking care for the audience and thinking about how you structure a story in terms of data, even if it's just an annotated chart, arrows pointing out key insights, key captions. So I don't think there's a great secret to it. I think it's just more people trying to showcare to give people a true insight from a data set or a story, really.

Yeah. I've seen one other sort of thing along these lines that's a bit simpler, kind of what you were just saying. And it's from EJ Fox, who I think still works at Mother Jones and he's working on a thing on GitHub and we can post a link to it, but essentially it's kind of a stepper in some ways that walks you through, lets you create a kind of story. You're doing it with code, but it's almost a little bit like a PowerPoint that you're seeing one thing at a time, but it's kind of lets you do captions, lets you kind of embed some interactive elements. So that's another kind of similar, but maybe more simplified version of the same idea.

That sounds very similar to that popcorn tool. And as I said, I think there will be much more tools like blending PowerPoint D3.

And I mean, essentially it's kind of marrying text and image as much as possible.

And we're back to the nineties multimedia all along.

CD Roms.

Exactly. Andrew.

It's our time now. It's our time.

Yes.

Flash.

Ta da. And just a segue to kind of another observation from the last year was the amount of individuals and organizations that shared their narratives, the design narratives.

Ta da. And just a segue to kind of another observation from the last year was the amount of individuals and organizations that shared their narratives, the design narratives.

I thought that was great.

So from the New York Times point of view ad the likes of Kevin Quayley with his fantastic charts and things blog, you know, not going for the full what's in all design process, but just revealing some of the background workings and some of the secrets behind their workflow. And the Washington Post have just started a blog recently which also reveals some of the work behind their pieces. And I think it's great when you see people justifying, reasoning how and why they've arrived at a solution given the problem they were given. And I think that's a much healthier place for us to judge if something's good or not. And I know Brian does a great job in critique and work, almost sometimes blindly to the objectives and the intentions. But to see people sharing their narratives, I think is a wonderful development that's mostly infographics.

And using infographics, I would hope that Datavis people, I mean, I know that Moritz is doing it, but that a few more people will, that it's more like a common thing.

Yeah, I hope that will happen in the future.

It's something I'm shooting for to try and move into is maybe away a little bit from the more blanket you can try to get, you know, talk to. Talk to people a bit and try and publish their reasoning too. So. Absolutely.

So that's a plan for your blog to make features that get in touch with the authors directly and a little bit of back and forth.

Yeah, I mean, like you said, we've seen a lot more of these on a couple of different sites, but, you know, almost like trying to get people to do it, asking people to do it might be more effective than kind of expecting them to publish their own blog about it.

Yeah, I totally agree. And sometimes, I mean, sometimes critique is fair if you just look at the end piece, but sometimes you really have to understand the project constraints to understand why certain decisions were good or bad. So. Yeah, that's a nice move.

So speaking of blogging, I want to mention maybe something that didn't happen in 2012. I think so. We have a few bloggers here in this show right now, and as far as I can tell, nothing special happened in terms of blogging in our area. Right.

New blogs.

Yeah, sorry, in terms of new blogs and in terms of new blogs.

Well, I heard there's this podcast and they seem to do really nice work.

Yeah, but that's still true. Just, you know, don't believe the hype.

Yeah, that was the perfect ball for you. That was perfect, actually.

It's an interesting, I've spoken to a few people through my courses, actually, and these are people trying to find a route into the subject in a more visible way. And a lot of them have been held back, I think, from doing or launching blogs because they don't quite know what space is left available. And I often tell them that actually just putting their own work up there or sharing their own thoughts, their own convictions is a great start. But I think to a lot of people there's a certain barrier to joining the club, as it were, just from the sheer fact that everything seems, from their perspective to have been sewn up and covered already. But I do try and encourage people to get involved. It's such a great way to publicise yourself, but also your own work and your own thoughts.

Well, there is an alternative. They could contact one of us and ask if they could guest block.

Exactly.

Yeah, sure, sure.

You know, if they feel so, they can always contact me.

But I do know that, I mean, there was a great site that you suppose quite often called fell in love with data, and I think that's dried up quite a lot recently. I'd like to see that being picked up.

No, but I mean, seriously, maybe it's not a bad thing, the fact that we didn't see any new blogs around, but maybe another connected trend is that we saw many more books coming out. So in a way, people are not blogging more, or we don't have new blogs, but we have new books, which in a way can be seen as a way to make, to turn information from blogs into something that is more solid, like books, more permanent. Definitely the case for you, Andy. Probably in a way it's similar for Alberto Cairo, even if it's not exactly the same. So I think it's a good thing that we are seeing more solid material because a blog, in a way, it's always. So regardless, the style, in a way, is something that develops over time and it's limited to the scene, to a single, to the space of a single post. So you cannot really go as deep as you would like, and you cannot. It's very hard to build a coherent picture out of several blog posts. Right. So having, not having new blogs, but having new books is definitely a good thing, in my opinion.

I also think, I think Robert picked up on this in the last episode that you did about the growth of things like Pinterest boards and tumblrs.

Oh, yeah, sure.

So I think that's another way for people to get in there just to kind of create and curate things that they like. And hopefully they'll then take the leap onto the next stage, which is, you know, commenting on these things and critiquing and, you know, and I think, I mean, from my point of view, starting the blog coming up to three years now was always about trying to force myself to write about the subject which carves and crafts up your own convictions and your own thoughts and beliefs, and it forces you to learn and also the quality of writing. You know, you can't just put anything up there. You have to really think about and care for the words that you put there because you will get, you know, quite quickly picked up on things. So, you know, I'd like to see more blogs this year. Whether or not that will happen, who knows? Because there are these very rapid tools and efficient tools for doing it quickly, but it would be great to see some new voices out there.

I absolutely agree. And it's interesting now that you say, but it's true. Maybe blogging has gone down the last year a bit. But I just realized what I'm missing is really good conversation about infovis on the web. Like, not just good writing in a one directional manner. We used to have lots of discussions around a single blog post, you know, like Manuel Lima's manifesto, Robert Kosara's line in the sand. Yeah, but there was really substantial discussion going on, so the discussion was longer than the blog post by far. And I couldn't recall that from the last year. And I think maybe that has. That has.

That's now taking place on Twitter. So my comment.

But there's a problem with discussions on Twitter. I mean, but the volume of comments.

That come onto my side have certainly, you know, reduced. And I think that's because people prefer to have their voice being heard on Twitter rather than being stuck away in a hidden comment. But I recall that very same manifesto discussion, which was fantastic. It drew the likes of David McCandless and Stephen Few and all the big hitters were on one place and pounding away against each other, and it was fantastic.

Do you think there's a reason? Is it like, are we congealing around certain ideas and there's not as much sort of controversial, you know, thoughts in data visualization, or is that kind of a naive thought?

I would say the discussion, maybe. I have the impression people got sick. A bit of discussion, quite a few posts that went in the same direction and did not get any comments or not, at least from those people that were on the big discussion list. Maybe people, like, not make a point again.

Maybe people are more focused on doing, which is great.

Actually, that's my impression, too. I mean, the one thing is really, you can only discuss, like, aesthetics versus functionality five times and then you're done.

Yeah.

Shall we do it again? I mean, darn it already, just for the.

I can find the aesthetic guy.

No, and the second thing is really everybody's doing his thing. Like, everybody's running with what he's got, you know, or she, and just doing his thing. And that's a good thing. Probably.

You're right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Hey, we have one viewer. Did you notice that? So if you are there, we will never learn. Oh, man.

Oh, maybe on Twitter.

Comparing to the people here.

One other time, please don't push.

I'll count a trend. Yeah, that narrative thing we discussed just to move on. Or did you want to add to that, Enrico?

No, I wanted to mention another topic, but go ahead.

Same with me.

Same with you. So I'll go first. Who goes first? I'll go first. So.

That's what I wanted to say. Of course.

So I was wondering whether you guys want to mention one or two people who think at a major, major developments in 2012. So we already mentioned Mike Bostock. I think that's, that's clear. Who else do you, do you guys want to mention? Oh, Andy wants to mention something.

I've put my hand up. I don't think you could avoid Santiago and the work he's done this last, well, especially the last six months. I mean, it's been quite prolific, the new projects that is published out there. And I know that some of them have been work that he's started out in previous years, that he's now refining and publishing. But, you know, some of the stuff he's been doing has been quite staggering. So I think he's dominated a lot of the new work of the last six months. Definitely.

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Yeah.

And he has such a strong style, such a strong personal style. And I think you can really see how fluent he is in code, that he's really, like, not hindered by it at all. And that's always so. He's a vital also. So that's, that's great to see. Yeah, he's cool. And Mike, for me, it's Mike, but I said that already.

So Mike, the New York Times graphics department in general.

Yeah.

He brought some very beautiful pieces out, whole year.

Thank you again.

And let's say, Moritz, I mean, it's embarrassing for him to hear this, but, you know, some of the work that you've been involving, Moritz has been fantastic this last year.

We don't talk.

Just reflecting on the motor in particular. I mean, that was a huge undertaking. You know, what's. How you look back on that now.

Yeah, I mean, that was one of the big things of the year for us. And, I mean, I sort of see it as a failure as well because I know what we set out to do and, you know, and we hit a lot of rocks along the road. But at the same time, I'm really happy about how it turned out. And, I mean, that's always with the good projects that, you know, you sort of, you have a sort of a certain ambivalence about them, I guess. Yeah, but I mean, that's, I mean, I think I said at the beginning of the year, real time is going to be big. And I realized over the year that sculptures and physical things are also one of the main themes. And so from this end, I'm also really happy to have learned about these things so much and to be able to experiment with them in the setting and this unique team and this unique context. So, yeah, it was pretty cool, but I would have a few ideas of how to do it again. Like, next Olympia.

But do you think, like, real time is like. I mean, real time was very big in the time of the year of the Olympics. Right. Everything that came out. Moritz is gone. This was actually a question for. I thought real time was sort of coming up during the Olympics with all the real. And football. UEFA. And then it's sort of, you know, outside of sports, I haven't seen any big or.

I don't know if there were any with the us elections or not.

Yeah.

Really real time or.

Yeah. But like that, which was not a red and blue map, right? Sure. There you go.

There we go.

Here is.

Your network, huh?

Yeah.

You're back.

Nice kitchen time, eh?

That was a cameraman.

From time to time. There is.

Oh, it's a new beer.

Genuine network problems.

These ISP's beer network problems.

You know how it is.

What was the question? Those last two points about the Olympics and the euros, and these are big data visualization events, and it's now become such an important device and product for all these organizations to. To show that they've got something in their armory as well.

And the elections. And the elections.

But I think what's interesting for me is that during the us elections in particular, and Brian will be probably most kind of close to all this, is the amount of choropleth maps, you just this kind of saturation of the same device, but actually kind of the kind of contrarian products like the Guardian Balloon project, if you recall that one. We could drag the balloons depending on how you wanted to sort of do. The different scenarios must have got so many hits, because it was something new and different and novelty, and it's kind of interesting thing, you know, if you're facing another big event in the future, do you play it straight with the obvious tool, or do you try and find something that differentiates you from the. From the rest?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think another example of exactly what you're talking about with the us elections is the. Again, the New York Times, 512 pass. I mean, that was one. That was just the most I've seen. Kind of saturated, even amongst my friends, who are not anywhere closely related to data visualization. They're kind of sharing that because it just made a lot more sense than a choropleth. Map and it was something different. And just really, I mean, that was the best way to distill it, is there are this many different scenarios of different ways this can go, and that's all the pundits are talking about. But this is kind of in one screen real estate, and you can kind of get it immediately. That was a huge one.

Is there's also a new trend for politicians in the Senate and Congress with infographics.

Absolutely.

During their big talks.

Yeah, I know someone at the Congressional Budget office, and he's on Twitter, too, Jonathan Schwabisch, and he does a lot, kind of obviously, educating people in the government about making data visualization, making graphs and, but also, you know, you know, he's working on projects that help explain what's going on. But also, you know, you can see, you know, you can see it coming up a lot more as a tool for, for people in politics to, you know, use.

Absolutely.

I think that that's been a big thing, really. Also this, like, against maybe this narrative trend, these tools for real time monitoring and, like, understanding complex systems and understanding complex processes. Processes. We had the 512 paths. We had the, I think for me it was the best work was the wind map by Fernandez Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, which is just, you know, there's no narrative. It's just, you can see all the winds blowing right now in the states. I mean, how awesome is that? And maybe also, yeah, things like these real time sports or second screen applications, these types of things, they are now really starting to get some traction. I think people have been talking about it for a while, but no, it's happening.

Just picking up on Bran's point there about people using these tools who are not in this field, just average people. I think the other tool that seemed to go beyond those boundaries was the guardians gay rights visualization. Did I think it was around March or April. That was something that seemed to once again penetrate into normal real life. And people were using that as a tool to explore all the different kind of different levels of liberal attitudes and situations around the different states in the US. I think that was another example of something that really reached out to normal people and non vis people, which was great.

Okay, so I don't know, do you want to mention more who's got more trends or anything?

I suppose just one more observation was just the quality or the perceived quality of the conferences last year. I mean, I attended Malofiege and visualize, which were both, you know, excellent, excellent events. I heard great things about viz week, and obviously IO festival, you know, as ever, went down really well. And, you know, I hope that same trend continues next year. So the announcement yesterday of the first 29 people think for the I O festival was announced, which is great. And there's an event taking place in Boston in May called the something like the Open, this conference that I think Irene Ross is involved in. So that sounds like a great lineup. And I think Moritz. No, sorry, I'm not sure if Moritz is involved, but tapestry at the end of the month is coming up, which sounds great. Robert Kosara is at that. Hopefully, the same trend will continue next year. These quality events bringing people together.

I agree. I agree.

Yeah. That's what I had on my list as well. One other one was another year of the visualizing marathon taking place all over the world. And, you know, obviously, judging and winners from that as well kind of help. All these things help kind of, you know, coalesce, you know, figure out what the community is, you know, connect people in the data visualization community, and kind of, you know, just kind of expand it a bit.

Yeah. And in the marathon, I think it was so obvious how much the quality has changed over the last, like, 18 months, you know, and now we had, like, thousands of students participate, and you could look at a random piece, and it was really decent, you know, and, I mean, that's super amazing. If you think that these things are done in 48 hours by beginners, it's, like, really cool. So I think that alone shows how much the field has changed already.

I think the same is true for. I don't remember the name. What's the contest organized by? David McCandless.

Info is beauty awards.

Info is beauty awards. I think more.

It's.

I think you participated.

Weren't these the ones I won?

Okay.

I think so. Yeah, exactly.

He doesn't like to talk about it.

You want to see the trophies? I get the trophies.

Yeah, get them.

He's actually gone.

Yeah.

Wow.

What does the eye mean?

Information.

Physical. Physical trophies.

Actually looks like it. That's cool. The other one looks like an info point.

Yeah. It's like. Yeah. If you have questions about a ticketing system.

Yeah.

You ask, you come here.

Very nice.

Cool.

No, it's a decent award. I think the jury is top notch.

Right?

No, but overall, I mean, beginning of the year, we were ranting about competitions, Enrico.

I remember that.

Yeah. At that time, I hadn't won. Yeah. And now. But now things really have improved.

I think as long as you win, really great.

There are top notch competitors.

No, but that's interesting. If you think back beginning of data stories, we were really, like, all these competitions and nothing good comes out of it. Right?

Yeah. One of the first episodes we've been.

Yep. And that was half a year ago. So count on our opinions too much, they might just change.

Yeah. Okay.

I don't know any other single works. Like what should people should be looking at if they want to see what was 2012? What was so 2012?

Well, one designer I was also going to mention who's not on the radar for many is a guy called Simon Scar who works at the South China Morning Post, and he does some fantastic work out there. And I first came across it and I think you will have done Moritz and Andrew as well at Malofiej. He does some great static work for the. The newspaper there and I think he's, you know, one to watch for the next year. Definitely.

Yep.

And he has a quite distinct style.

Yeah. Yeah. Very, very unique. Yeah.

So maybe we can conclude by mentioning what are your best wishes for 2013? So what's going to be the best. So the best outcome in 2013 for this? Of course.

So world peace doesn't count. World piece doesn't count.

Well, obviously.

What do you want to see happening in 2013?

I want to see every bookshelf with a certain book.

Yes. Sold or not sold, empty of these certain. Constantly being refilled and still they evaporate.

You know, honestly, I think just, you know, a continuation of the same, you know, the same. I think before we came on air, we were chatting about the average being raised and the, you know, the median quality being raised. I think, you know, if that continues next year, that we're a successful year for everyone. Really.

Yeah. It's all the stuff we talked about continuing, for sure.

In a way, I agree. I mean, it's clear that we are growing as a community. The old field is getting better and better and more mature. So I agree, in a way. I want to see in 2013 the same rate of development we got so far. It's been. It's been great. Actually, we should mention that it's been great during the last couple of years. It's been great. I mean, I consider myself very lucky to. I decided to work in this area and I never. I never thought that it would be just so perfect. I don't know how long it's gonna last, but as long as it lasts, it's been great. Right. I hope you guys agree.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, it's super exciting. And if you think back, a year passes and so much has changed already and you know, so many new people, new development. So it's crazy. Yeah.

Okay.

Andrew, any more things from you?

Well, I was thinking, wish I would like to hear more success stories.

That's true.

That's more like we made this visualization and that's what we discovered from it. Or that's how much money we saved or that's how many lives we saved, or that politician made a better decision because of that. I still think that field is a bit missing, these sort of things. Or there could be more if we really want to prove that it's valuable.

Right. I think that goes along with just, you know, more things, more visualizations, kind of with the purpose of communication. Kind of like what is the success? How do you measure the success of communicating something like, you know, and you kind of have to define that beforehand in some ways. But, you know, I think that goes along with what we've talked about and what I want to see more of which is, you know, using visualization, kind of the storytelling, you know, really effective examples of it, just more and more. Because I think we just started to see some really good stuff towards the end of the year. But maybe, you know, hopefully that means it'll be twice that next year.

Yeah. I just want to mention, I fully agree with Andrew that we have had this problem for a long time now. But I always ask myself whether this is due more to the fact that these success stories don't exist at all or whether they're not communicated. And actually I don't have an answer to that. But there might be, it might be the case that actually there are success stories out there, but they are just not. People who are successful with visualization don't have time to communicate.

It's possibly the detachment between those who create the things and those who use them.

Yeah, exactly.

You're not there to see people actually using these things. So I hope so.

I mean, at least I hope so. I like to think that that's the case.

Yeah, it has to be. It must be. Yeah.

Yeah.

But at the same time, I think that it touches a bit on the evaluation point. And the more you move away from engineering towards cultural activity and communication, the more difficult it becomes to measure success, you know? So if you build this, you know, you have this new type of gear or screw and your motor is like 10% faster, that's, that's clear, you know, but if you successfully raised awareness for a global issue.

Yeah, but you can still say that visualization has a full potential to help people do something. Right. This can be for instance, in the humanitarian field or in other, or in science or whatever. And we are. It's true that we are missing these kind of things like scientists coming to us and say, look, using Tableau, I discovered that protein x and y interact with blah, blah, blah. I don't know. Right. And this can be a cure for cancer. Right. I mean, of course, that's too big. Right. But that's the kind of thing that we are missing here. And I agree with Andrew. We don't know. I mean, if this is just not communicated or it's not happening at all.

Yeah. I for one, would wish for integration of visualization in more mainstream tools, you know, so there's no visualization in Facebook, there's no visualization in Google. There's no visualization in word. There is no visualization on PowerPoint. I'd like to see it on operating systems. I'm a bit confused. I mean, why, why don't I have, like plenty of visualization in Mac OS X? I'm really confused about that. And I'd like to wish for that if I can make a wish.

Great request.

Hopefully be noticed somewhere in two minutes.

Your phone goes apple on the line.

Yeah, exactly.

Good idea. You never know. You never know who's listening to data stories.

That's right.

Maybe Mark, you know Mark who?

Zuckerberg. He might be a bit too busy, but if not. Hey, Mark.

Hey, Mark. He's the one viewer on the channel.

You can come as a guest whenever you.

That's interesting. Oh, maybe we should make guest wishes.

That's interesting. Oh, maybe we should make guest wishes.

Guest wishes? Yeah.

Or maybe you can suggest guests for the next year who should.

Come on, guys.

Oh, yeah, I thought about that.

Please think big.

Yeah, I already have.

Bit smaller.

No, but these guys behind this infographics website, I would, I would like, like visually against visualizing or these guys from venngage and visualize me and whatever.

I think have them all in one episode and have them and discuss like.

Business plans and future and what is really there. Well, what is their kind of goal? You know, of course it's making money, but is there some. Something behind it? And will they think that they can reach these goals?

It's interesting to line up all the platforms also maybe visualizing.org because they are not exactly a startup, but more a foundation type thing.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah.

Good idea. Yeah. And Stephen Fu and Eddie. Right. I mean, that's.

Of course.

Tea would be nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who else?

David McCandless.

Yeah, we should do that.

The headline, headline act would be Edward Tufte with Nigel Holmes.

Yeah, that would be fun. Fun would last for ten minutes, probably ten minutes of silence.

Something from the tapestry conference with Robert and whatever sort of comes out of that after that.

Yes. I totally thought we should have Robert again for just talking about narratives, because he's now totally into it and we didn't touch on that, really.

And I think one of the key speakers there is Scott McLeod, who did understanding, obviously. I think that'd be a good one.

Yeah. I already said I won't go, but maybe I should go.

I'll be there. I'll be there. You will go?

Yeah. That's something. You can do it.

I think I will.

I can do it. Yeah. But it's always complicated doing these kind of things at conferences. It was a big achievement for me to do one at this week with Andrew. Believe it.

How about the I o guys? Head of the festival. So J Wes.

Wes. Yeah, that would be nice.

Dave or some academic big guys. I won't mention names because I will forget a few. I'm sure Enrico can get you access to a few of those, like even two or three together and really talk about some hard problems, because we talk about research and science, but I think for the general public, it would be nice to hear, like, what is the hard problem here inside? And, you know, where all these PhDs, what are they actually doing? Are they just making visualizations or. What is the hard problem? And they might be able to explain that.

Yeah, yeah, we might be able to do that.

You think it's more fun to hang out with a few bloggers? I do think it is fun to hang out with a few.

Preparation for Visweek. It would be nice. Erica, that's a good idea.

Yeah, no, but it's true. It's true. I mean, you mentioned hard problems. I think that's another issue. What are the other problems to solve here? That's an issue. Yeah, I agree. Okay.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Lovely, guys. Lovely.

So we filled up the agenda for 2013, Moritz, you're welcome for that.

I think there's enough to do now for all of us.

I think we piled it up.

Yeah, exactly.

By the way, there will be. So me and Moritz, we realized that it will be one year of data stories not too far from.

From today, mid February, and all guests get a surprise.

Yeah, I mean, we have to come. So if we. If you have any ideas on what kind of party we can do, we should make an online party or something. I don't know.

Chateaulet party anyway.

Or maybe just another hangout.

I think just present is the best way.

Yeah, yeah.

Like golden necklaces and stuff?

Yeah.

No, like this plexiglass, like rectangle with an eye inside.

Oh, yeah. You want one of these? Just for bragging?

Maybe then I will appreciate competitions more.

Right?

Okay, I think that's all for today. Thanks a lot, guys. It's been a lot of fun, as usual.

Thanks all. That's been great. We can do that every year if it's for me.

Sure, yeah, of course.

I'm that good stuff. Okay, bye.