workshop – Boris Gorelik

An even better data visualization workshop

Boris Gorelik teaching in front of an audience.

Yesterday, I gave a data visualization workshop at EuroSciPy 2018 in Trento. I spent HOURs building and improving it. I even developed a “simple to use, easy to follow, never failing formula” for data visualization process (I’ll write about it later).

I enjoyed this workshop so much. Both preparing it, and (even more so) delivering it. There were so many useful questions and remarks. The most important remark was made by Gael Varoquaux who pointed out that one of my examples was suboptimal for vision impaired people. The embarrassing part is that one of the last lectures that I gave in my college data visualization course was about visual communication for the visually impaired. That is why the first thing I did when I came to my hotel after the workshop was to fix the error. You may find all the (corrected) material I used in this workshop on GitHub. Below, is the video of the workshop, in case you want to follow it.

Photo credit: picture of me delivering the workshop is by Margriet Groenendijk

Today’s workshop material

Today, I hosted a data visualization workshop, as a part of the workshop day adjacent to the fourth Israeli Data Science Summit. I really enjoyed this workshop, especially the follow-up questions. These questions are the reason I volunteer talking about data visualization every time I can. It may sound strange, but I learn a lot from the questions people ask me.

If you want to see the code, you may find it on GitHub. The slide deck is available on Slideshare

If you know matplolib and are in Israel on May 27th, I need your help

So, the data visualization workshop is fully booked. The organizers told me to expect 40-50 attendees and I need some assistance. I am looking for a person who will be able to answer technical questions such as “I got a syntax error”, “why can’t I see this graph?”, “my graph has different colors”.

It’s a good opportunity to attend the workshop for free, to learn a lot of useful information, and to meet a lot of smart people.

It’s a win-win situation. Contact me now at boris@gorelik.net

Prerequisites for the upcoming data visualization workshop

I have been told that the data visualization workshop (“Data Visualization from default to outstanding. Test cases of tough data visualization“) is completely sold out. If you plan to attend this workshop, please check out the repository that I created for it [link]. In that repository, you will find a list of pre-requisites that you absolutely need to meet before the workshop. Also, it will be very helpful if you could fill this poll which will help me prepare for the workshop.

See you soon

I will host a data visualization workshop at Israel’s biggest data science event

TL/DR

What: Data Visualization from default to outstanding. Test cases of tough data visualization

Why: You would never settle for default settings of a machine learning algorithm. Instead, you would tweak them to obtain optimal results. Similarly, you should never stop with the default results you receive from a data visualization framework. Sadly, most of you do.

When: May 27, 2018 (a day before the DataScience summit)/ 13:00 – 16:00

Where: Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) at Herzliya.

More info: here.

Timeline:
1. Theoretical introduction: three most common mistakes in data visualization (45 minutes)
2. Test case (LAB): Plotting several radically different time series on a single graph (45 minutes)
3. Test case (LAB): Bar chart as an effective alternative to a pie chart (45 minutes)
4. Test case (LAB): Pie chart as an effective alternative to a bar chart (45 minutes)

More words

According to the conference organizers, the yearly Data Science Summit is the biggest data science event in Israel. This year, the conference will take place in Tel Aviv on Monday, May 28. One day before the main conference, there will be a workshop day, hosted at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. I’m super excited to host one of the workshops, during the afternoon session. During this workshop, we will talk about the mistakes data scientist make while visualizing their data and the way to avoid them. We will also have some fun creating various charts, comparing the results, and trying to learn from each others’ mistakes.