Tapestry Short Stories Line-Up 2018
I addition to amazing keynotes, Tapestry also has shorter talks, which we call Short Stories. We asked for submissions on fairly short notice and got more than three times as many as we could accept — a good problem to have!
This is our line-up this year, listed in alphabetical order:
Aritra Dasgupta (NJIT), As you show, so shall you reap: causes and consequences of bad design in (scientific) visual communication. Does bad design lead to bad science? Why should scientists invest their time in learning about visualization best practices? My talk will explore these questions about communication-oriented visualization design in science domains. I will demonstrate what a value proposition looks like for scientists to alter their well-established design conventions, some of which can lead to errors in visual judgment or sub-optimal user experience.
Jason Forrest (McKinsey), The Data Visualizations of W.E.B. Du Bois. At the 1900 Paris Exposition an African-American team lead by W.E.B. Du Bois sought to challenge and recontextualize the understanding of the “Negro” in America. In 5 months, his team conducted the sociological research and hand-made more than 60 large data visualizations for a massive European audience which ultimately awarded Du Bois a gold medal for his efforts. The ramification of this work remains challenging to this day.
Kristin Henry (Datablick), Storytelling with Color. Curious about how an artist changes over time, I took my coding and data visualization tools to explore color changes. First, with my own year-long drawing adventure. Then, with the career of a comedic video artist.
Aditya Jain (Sigri), A Library for you. We will open the greatest treasure chest in history, together.
Bill Shander (Beehive Media): WORDS > VISUALS — Your Words are More Important than your Visual. Most visualizations literally mean nothing without words (labels, context-setting text, etc.) Equally as importantly, and perhaps surprisingly to many, in addition to on-page/on-screen words in all of their various forms, it’s the words you use to tell the data story to yourself that are they key to your success. When you actually take the time to write words down before trying to create the visual experience, if you allow yourself to be insanely detailed, and concentrate deeply on WHAT you want to say to your audience, it will usually end up leading you DIRECTLY to the visual that will best communicate that information. If it doesn’t get you there, at a minimum, those words will ALWAYS become your gut check against which you can confirm that the visual is telling the story you want it to, emphasizing what needs emphasizing, encouraging actions and reactions you’re hoping for your audience.
Nadja Popovich (New York Times), Personalizing Climate Change. Climate change can often feel abstract, far away in both time and space. In this talk, I’ll show a recent Times project that attempts to localize the impacts of our warming world. I’ll talk through some of the challenges of personalizing climate data, and how visuals and interactivity can help readers understand this complex topic in a more intimate way.
Alex Wein (Bugcrowd), Charts as Utterances. What makes a chart good or bad? Like any other form of communication, a chart succeeds if it conveys an intended idea to an intended audience. By treating visualization as communication, we can use tools from other fields. I’ll borrow from pragmatics — the subfield of linguistics that examines how context impacts the meaning of words — to look at how the context in which a chart is “uttered” determines what is communicated.
For more about the program, stay tuned here and check on the Tapestry website! And register soon!
