Appearance

Listen To Me Dispense My Wisdom on the Data Stories Podcast! ​

Last week, I recorded a guest appearance on the Data Stories podcast with Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner. Find out if the voice you imagine when reading this blog sounds like my voice (spoiler: it doesn't), and how my Austrian accent meshes with Moritz' German and Enrico's Italian ones (spoiler: very well).

You can listen directly on the podcast website in your browser, or you can subscribe to the podcast. You should really do the latter, so you won't miss episodes in the future. Another thing to do, once you've listened to the latest episode, is to go through the archive and listen to some of the previous episodes with guests like Andy Kirk, Jeff Heer, and Alberto Cairo.

We talked about many different topics, including how I got started with visualization, how this website got started (and my crazy ideas for what I wanted to do), how blogging can help your tenure case, my move to Tableau, research at Tableau, and a lot of other things I can't even remember. We had a lot of fun, and I think we made some good points.

A bit of context to some of the things we talk about in the episode:

  • I cite Rudolf Arnheim as one of my influences. His books, The Power of the Center, Visual Thinking, and Art and Visual Perception are highly recommended.
  • Everything you need to know about blur for visualization can be found in these two papers: Semantic Depth of Field and Useful Properties of Semantic Depth of Field for Better F+C Visualization
  • We mention tumblr as a great way to get started blogging rather than wasting time, but I also recommend WordPress.com. You really can't go wrong with either.
  • eagereyes is, indeed, over six years old. I wrote a posting on its fifths birthday last year, but somehow forgot to do that this year. I registered the domain on August 12, 2004, the first posting is from October 1, 2006 (which is what I consider its birthday). So I screwed around for over a year before settling on the eventual content management system and blog format (I describe early ideas and what I want to do in the podcast).
  • And, of course, xkcd.

But don't forget to listen to the actual podcast!

Posted by Robert Kosara on December 9, 2012. Filed under self-promotion, Data Stories.