The Graphical Web 2014

Last week I had a lovely time down in Winchester with m’colleague, attending The Graphical Web 2014. This year the theme was ‘Visual Storytelling’, so I’d gone along to see what new things we could learn about visualisation to include in the MSc in Computational Journalism. We’d also already had a few conversations about the course with people who were going to be at the conference, so we were planning to take the opportunity to chat in person about their involvement.

There were many excellent informative and entertaining talks, ranging from the process behind the redesign of Google Maps, through how Twitter does data visualisation, and on to what happens when your data visualisation becomes immensely popular. I’d highly recommend anyone with an interest in any of this to take some time to look through the schedule and watch the videos of some of the talks - I’ll certainly be forcing the MScCompJ students to watch a few.

There were some interesting messages from people at the conference that I’ll be taking forward with my own work and trying to impart to the students. One that is key, I think, is to strike the right balance between detail and simplicity when presenting data. This was mentioned several times throughout the conference, but it really is important. Too much information in your visualisation and you can alienate the reader and confuse or hide your message. Not enough information and the context is lost, and the use of the design to the more advanced reader is reduced. It’s one of those balancing acts that we find so often when trying to mix both people and computers. Attempting to solve this problem and find this balance is challenging and interesting, and I look forward to seeing how the students next year cope with it.

Overall, it was a really good conference. I met a number of interesting people,  found a whole set of new people to follow on Twitter, and returned to Cardiff excited about the year ahead.