Foto credit

Would the field of data vis benefit from a clear line between art and design, as Lisa C. Rost suggests (see also the follow-up post)?

This debate has been around for a while (see e.g. Lev Manovich’s Info Aesthetics, The Manifesto debate, the Cargo Cult debate, Jorge Camoe’s attempts, but also helpful papers like “The Role of Design in Information Visualization“ etc) and of course, there is a literally a century of discourse on art and design in other fields as well.

Here’s my take:

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If you travel across Germany, you will notice how some place name endings are quite universal, and others are quite specific, regionally. -ach, -ingen, -zell is a little exploration of those spatial patterns. It was a welcome opportunity to experiment with a few techniques I wanted to learn more about. Find the code with some remarks on github.

The eyeo festival and the community around it has a very special place in my heart. When Dave Schroeder announced the team was editing a book to celebrate the fifth anniversary, my immediate thought was to use this opportunity to follow up on an old idea, which I had been kicking around for a while (also with a few friends) — mapping the community around this arts-tech-creative-code-datavis thing.

What are the different niches in the community? Who is bridging the clusters? How do places, institutions, shape these communities, how do people influence each other over time? End of the day, I’d really like to have this big map of how the last 20 years went down in the field.

So, I took the chance and asked each eyeo contributor (speaker, panelist, lecturer…) from the past five years to name their most important connections in three categories:

resulting in the eyeo scenegraph network visualization:

This map is much less about the big topology and importance of individual nodes, but much more about all the individual connections and anecdotes. You really need to take some time to study all the links and references.

Most interesting to me — the list of people who were mentioned by at least two others, but never spoke themselves at the festival (or, at least, din’t answer the survey): Nicole Aptekar, Mike Migurski, Laszlo Barabasi, Maria Popova, Steve Reich, John Cage, Aurelia Moser, Alexander Galloway, Daito Manabe (spoke in 2013), Jesper Kouthoofd, Michael Naimark, Sep Kamvar, John Maeda.

The workflow for this one was quite complex – a python script to collect the data (took days, as the new twitter API allows only very limited access), layout calculations in gephi, svg export for manual tweaks in Illustrator.

But, it left me (and Golan Levin, who dropped by at my house one day :D) a bit unsatisfied: where are all the other people… Just focussing on the people on stage seemed inadequate for eyeo, where the visitors are sometimes more interesting than the speakers :D

Luckily, the eyeo team collected twitter handles from attendees! So I went on and created the eyeo crowdcloud:

A network map, showing 852 twitter accounts related to the eyeo festival. The network layout was calculated using gephi and brings more strongly connected accounts closer together. The size of the account labels corresponds to the number of followers in this network. Each line drawn is a followership relation. It is colored according to the followers color which is assigned based on the angular position on the map. As a result, accounts with followers from many different regions of the map look more colorful.

This one is much more dense and interesting from a “landscape” point of view — the different sub communities are represented quite well on different areas in the map, with colorful connectors in the center :)

Obvious “see also”: The resonet visualization I did for resonate.

And, here’s the best part — the visuals actually made it to the book — as cover and chapter visuals!

I am super grateful to Dave Schroeder and the team for this huge honor, and enabling me to give back to a festival that has been so important for me!

Now, my only drop of bitterness is that I’ll miss the festival next week… but there’s only so-and-so much travel I (and the family) can enjoy. I’ll be following on twitter! ;)

After many months — building your own sites is hard! — I am finally able to launch truth-and-beauty.net, my new portfolio site! It replaces the old moritz.stefaner.eu, which now lives at archive.stefaner.eu, as I was not able to (and probably won’t) migrate all old contents over.

A few notes on technology – I knew I wanted a static site generator, rather than a database driven site. Being able to sync, version control, move the whole site with normal file operations is such a huge win. After a few experiments with Jekyll, Octopress and DocPad, I finally settled for kirby. I really don’t like php. But I really like kirby. It is the only half-way sane CMS I know and working with it has been a breeze so far. Thanks Bastian!

I long, long resisted going to IEEE VIS, but this year, it’s about time. I’ll moderate a panel featuring top notch speakers: Tariq, Scott, Matteo, Greg and I will try to shed some light on what it’s like to work with and publish data in the NGO context, and how we can improve! This should be interesting. Check out the (simple) announcement video here:

The other thing I am really looking forward to, is the tutorial I’ll teach together with Dominikus Baur. We will look at all the practical aspects of producing successful web-based data visualizations — except the actual data vis code. So, we will discuss deeplinking, performance, shareability, help and explanations, fallbacks, mobile optimizations – all the stuff that makes great web applications really great, but which we all underestimate all the time.

Looking forward! Who else is going? Ping me!

PS: Maybe we should do a datastories listener meetup? Or something?

A little sideproduct from the selfiecity project: