Features:

OpenVis Conf Wrap-Up and Videos

All the talks, all the time

Posted on: June 13, 2013

The first ever OpenVis Conf, held last month in Cambridge, MA, was jam-packed with excellent talks for people working in and around journalism. Over the last few weeks, we’ve posted detailed writeups of several talks from OpenVis Conf, but the videos of all the talks are now online, so you don’t have to take our word for it.

Below are a few of the talks we found especially helpful for designers and programmers working in news organizations—but it’s worth noting that the conference didn’t really have any bad talks, so it’s very worthwhile to take a look at the full list at the bottom of this post as well.

A Few Highlights

Live Data

Periscopic founder Kim Rees gave a moving, challenging talk about the difficulties of getting to raw data, the problem of getting lost in statistics, and the making of Periscopic’s US gun deaths visualization.

Data Viz About Data Viz

Amanda Cox from the New York Times gave an excellent keynote on effective visualizations. We wrote it up, but the video includes a lot more than we could describe.

Deep Visualization

Juan Velasco of National Geographic began the second day of the conference with a wonderfully nerdy and detailed talk on his magazine’s extraordinarily detailed processes, from model-building to 3D. Less a talk for practical tips than a call to take greater care with the preparation of visualizations.

Responsive Visualization

The Boston Globe’s Gabriel Florit dug into the very real challenges of making visualizations responsive, using examples from his team’s work. (Our write-up.)

Accessibility, Up Close

The W3C’s Doug Schepers gave a startling, entertaining, and important talk on accessibility in visualizations and on the web. We gave up on trying to write this one up because it’s too important to take in as much of the audio and video as possible.

Why Canvas? (Or Anything Else)

Twitter’s Miguel Rios spoke about the rationale for choosing a given set of technologies to implement a visualization. (Our write-up.)

Open Maps Forever

Tom MacWright, of MapBox, spoke about open, interactive mapping using Tilemill and an ecosystem of related tools. If you work with maps, you won’t want to miss it.

OpenVis Conf Wrap-Up and Videos

All the talks, all the time