Influencing Data Visualization Forever

By: Gordon Fleetwood – ODSC data science team contributor

Data Viz, Big Data and other related topics will be discussed at our Data Science Workshops, training sessions and conferences. Take a look at some of Data Science’s most influential players.

Santiago Giraldo works for CartoDB and does a lot of data visualization work with geospatial data. One of his projects addressed gerrymandering, the manipulation of the boundaries of electoral constituencies to favor a political party. Specifically, he looked at this phenomenon in New York, and how it could be tied to income inequality.

Larry Buchanan’s experience in visualization stretches back years before his current position at the New York Times, where he created the piece linked to above. The stop of every subway in New York City is shown, and the median income associated with the neighborhood surrounding each of them. It is both awesome and sobering to follow the rise and fall of each graph’s points as it goes through boroughs and neighborhoods.

The map shows the magnitude of people needing to take advantage of feeding programs in 2013 across the world. The percentage of these people suffering from kwashiokor, a disease characterized by a severe lack of protein, is highlighted.

Mr. Cherven is a Data Visualization Specialist at General Motors, and his talk at ODSC East will focus on the open-source tools available for visualizing complex networks. His work in this field is extensive and most of its public face focuses on baseball.

Visualizing scientific concepts is extremely important in communicating their key ideas. This is where Bang Wong, Creative Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and others like him come in. Vis Skunkworks is one of his initiatives which seeks to provide clarity for concepts in genomics through visualization.

The visualization highlighted here, however, is a network of voting patterns in the United States House of Representatives in the Fall of 2014. With a click of a button you can see which votes passed or failed, and who on either side of the aisle voted for it.

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