Field News

As previewed last week, myself and Francis Gagnon organised a poster session at Tapestry to tap in to the collective wisdom of attendees seeking suggestions on how we as a community can help to navigate the choppy waters of this era of fake news etc.

As you may or may not have noticed, we are living through a rather interesting time, to say the least. Indeed some may prefer I use far stronger words than interesting, but this is a family show.

Yesterday we learnt the terribly sad news of the passing of Hans Rosling. My condolences go out to his family, friends, and colleagues as well as the countless others who were affected by this news.

I wanted to briefly profile this beautifully produced new book, titled ‘The Origin of (almost) Everything‘ from the New Scientist, authored by Graham Lawton and illustrated by the brilliant Jennifer Daniel. The book poses and answers some of the key questions about where and how things originated, covering fundamental topics such as ‘Why are we

The multi-talented visualisation entrepreneur Rachel Binx has clearly been very busy of late and has announced a couple of new ventures, expanding her fleet of custom visualisation-driven-designed products with the launch of ‘Cliffs&Coasts’ and ‘manymaps’.

I’m happy to help spread word about an interesting new FREE ebook that has been published on the excellent, long-running ‘Interaction Design Foundation’ website. The book is titled ‘Bringing Numbers to Life: LAVA and Design-Led Innovation in Visual Analytics’.

In October, the leading academic data visualisation conference, IEEE VIS 2016, is heading to Baltimore, running from 23rd to the 28th. One of the many rich strands that make up this conference will be the ‘Visualization in Practice (VIP)’ events.

I had the pleasure of joining Alberto Cairo, Jorge Camoes, and Stephanie Evergreen to record a special one-off ‘Book club’ discussing our respective experiences in recently working on new data visualisation books.

This was a short survey used to assess the appetite and needs for training in specific tools/applications/libraries for producing data visualisation work. The purpose was to quantify the challenges of training specific tools alongside the broader teaching of data visualisation.