Sustainable Software Institute – Research Data Visualisation Workshop

Last week I gave a talk and delivered a hands on session at the Sustainable Software Institute’s ‘Research Data Visualisation Workshop‘ which was held at Manchester University. It was a really engaging event, with a lot of good discussion on the issues surrounding data visualisation.

Professor Jessie Kennedy from Edinburgh Napier University gave a great keynote looking at a some key design principles in visualisation, including a number of studies I hadn’t seen before but will definitely be including in my teaching in future.

I gave a talk on ‘Human Science Visualisation’ which really focused on a couple of key issues. Firstly, I tried to illustrate the importance of interactivity in complex visualisations. I then talked about how we as academic researchers need publish our interactive visualisations in posterity, and how we should press academic publishers to help us communicate our data to readers. Finally, I wanted to point people towards the excellent visualisation work being done by data journalists, and that the newsrooms are an excellent source of ideas and tips for data visualisation. The slides for my talk are here. It’s the first time I’ve spoken about visualisation outside of the classroom, and it was a really fun talk to give.

We also had two great talks from Dr Christina Bergmann and Dr Andy South, focusing on issues of biological visualisation and mapping respectively. All the talks generated some good discussion both in the room and online, which was fantastic to see.

In the afternoon I lead a hands on session looking at visualising data using d3. This was the first time I’d taught a session using d3 v4, which made things slightly interesting. I’m not fully up to speed with all the areas of the API that have changed, so getting the live coding right first time was a bit tricky, but I think I managed. Interestingly, I feel that the changes made to the .data(), .exit(), .enter(), update cycle as discussed in Mike’s “What Makes Software Good” make a lot more sense from a teaching perspective. The addition of .merge() in particular helps a great deal. As you might expect from a d3 workshop that lasted a mere three hours, I’m not entirely convinced that everybody ‘got’ it, but I think a most went away satisfied.

Overall it was a very successful workshop. Raniere Silva did an excellent job putting it together and running the day, and I really enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to seeing what other people thought about it too.