Posts by: Jen
Kindness
When I was in high school, Robert Coles came to speak. Robert Coles is the child psychologist who worked with six-year-old Ruby Bridges in 1960, the year that she, by herself, integrated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. The details of Ruby Bridges’ story are extraordinary.
Coles talked to a [...]
CHOICES | global human development is a visualization of selected data from the Human Development Report 2011, which focuses on the challenge of creating sustainable and equitable progress globally. The HDR ranks 187 countries according to their Human Development Index (HDI). Countries are further grouped into 4 broad categories: very high, high, medium, and [...]
We took all our whimsy and some code to San Francisco last weekend to participate in Hypothesis: An Art/Science Fair at The Lab. The event was fantastic, with a huge turnout despite a downpour, and interesting projects from all artist/scientist participants. Our project was mobbed most of the night, and we took [...]
What follows are the slides and transcript from my WikiSym talk for the WikiViz 2011 award. Parts of the talk are showing up around the web, and I wanted to have the full context somewhere.
A presentation is about the context of a particular moment, the people, pacing, and tone, and being available afterwards for [...]
For the WikiViz 2011 contest, which marks the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia, I wanted to make something a little epic and a lot open. I used the open source software Processing and R for the visualization and data manipulation. The data is all openly available online from Wikipedia and the World Bank.
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My take on aesthetics vs. utility in infovis – I promise this will only happen once (unless you meet me in person and want to argue about it):
For context, if you need it: Andrew Gelman’s critique of Robert Kosara’s Infovis example
Above: Kosara’s example from Statistical Computing & Graphics (p. 5)
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I spend massive amounts of time trying to make beautiful, meaningful vector fields that represent wind flow. The problem is this: no matter how lovely they are, static images do a poor job of representing dynamic flow through time.
So I went to the epic Eyeo Festival, learned some Processing from Jer [...]
Pictures that emphasize what we already know – “security blankets” to reassure us – are frequently not worth the space they take.
Pictures that have to be gone over with a reading glass to see the main point are wasteful of time and inadequate of effect.
The greatest value of a picture is when it [...]
