Meet Amanda Makulec, the new DVS Executive Director!
Plus Data Feminism, Doom Haikus, and data literacy
This past week, the Data Visualization Society held its first ever Annual General Meeting and elected a new Board of Directors — congratulations to all who were elected! The Board will be led by Amanda Makulec, the new DVS Executive Director. In her day job, Amanda is Data Visualization Lead at Excella, where she develops data visualization products for federal, nonprofit, and private sector clients. She has also been active in DVS for years, serving most recently as Operations Director, Nightingale writer, and frequent Slack contributor.
Of course, we couldn’t let her assume her new role without first answering our three burning questions.
Three Questions with… Amanda Makulec
1. If you could be any type of chart, what would you be?
I’d choose to be a dot plot. They’re simple enough to be accessible to a wide array of audiences and encode data points precisely, but can be formatted and annotated in so many creative ways in order to be more visually engaging and communicate clearly.
2. If you were stuck on a desert island, what viz would you want to create and what would you use to make it?
I’d create a pair of charts: a calendar to track the date so I don’t wholly lose track of time and a map to plot what I learn about the island and where I can find potable fresh water. I’d look for a flat piece of wood to carve into or use some foraged berries if they have a saturated enough color to use as ink!
3. What is one visualization that has inspired you?
The Emotional Valence of Broadway by Lindsey Poulter. I love the topic (‘show tunes’ is always one of my top categories on my end-of-year Spotify readout) and the dense amount of information packed into a really elegant design. The colors she chose for the more negative/more positive continuum, the small multiple line charts, and the organization of her charts — from a big picture comparison across soundtracks to the details of each musical’s songs — create a delightful experience for the reader and embody great viz design practices.
Reminder: Outlier!
Don’t forget to register for the upcoming DVS Outlier conference if you haven’t already! Tickets are available at a price of your choice.
Trivia
Question from the last issue of The ‘Gale: In keeping with the New Year theme, which of the following is not a common practice for observing the arrival of the new year? Is it a) eating 12 grapes at the stroke of midnight, b) kissing at midnight, c) cracking open a peppermint pig, or d) hopping back and forth over a threshold 12 times at midnight?
Answer: d) Hopping back and forth over a threshold 12 times at midnight. While that may not be a common practice, it is one way to get started right away on your “exercise more” New Year’s Resolution.
Write All About It!
One of the tenets of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s book Data Feminism is that data projects — particularly Big Data projects — often “miss” (sometimes intentionally; sometimes not) essential data or context. Have you worked on a data project that demonstrated a dedication to incorporating local knowledge, indigenous knowledge, or traditionally-undervalued forms of information? Tell us about it! Or, would you like to research examples of local or indigenous dataviz that haven’t received the recognition they deserve? Let’s expand our discourse on data and dataviz to reflect the many perspectives out there that have been overlooked or dismissed.
For more on Data Feminism, you can read a Nightingale interview with author Catherine D’Ignazio here: None Of Us Are Free If Some Of Us Are Not: Catherine D’Ignazio on Data Feminism
In the Wild
Fun visualizations and dataviz-adjacent content from around the interweb:
In Case You Missed It
A Complementary Word for Proprioception
While dataviz is good at depicting the scale of things, doing so in relation to ourselves is another endeavour. Though humans may be good at relating to our own body’s scale and position, Elena Etter examines why we struggle to scale in respect to other bodies.
Typescript: D3’s Loyal Sidekick
If D3.js was a superhero, Typescript would be its loyal sidekick. Maxene Graze unpacks this productive pairing with two case studies from her D3 learning roadmap. (And we got a “kick” out of the visualization she found for her lead image!)
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