Monthly Update: April, 2024
One series ends and one starts. FILWD reading clubs. Miscellaneous updates.
Hey Gents! Is spring here yet or not? ☀️ ⛅ 🌧️
In this part of the world (New England), spring never seems to come. No matter how many years I have spent around here, my Italian blood simply fails to adapt to this time of the year. I hope you all are experiencing sunshine in your section of the world!
Anyways, I am digressing. Last month, a lot of important and new things happened in FILWD, and a whole bunch of new things are going to happen in April. Here I am with another monthly report to summarize the near past and future of this newsletter.
“Shape the Data, Shape the Thinking” Concluded!
In March, I finally concluded the series on the role of data transformation in visualization. Links to the whole series are at the bottom of the introductory post.
It’s been a long journey, and I am happy with how it turned out. This is my first completed series, and I am completely persuaded that working on a series has a very high value for the newsletter. Series forces me to go beyond individual posts and think about larger topics. My hope is that, eventually, these series will turn into something bigger like books, courses, etc. I have not decided what to do with the data transformation series yet, but I am thinking of turning it into an ebook or something similar. In any case, the learning value of developing it has been enormous. Now, I am prepared to teach about the role of data transformation in visualization in my courses, and I have a much more complete framework to talk about it. For years, I felt that it was a big gap, and I am happy to have it filled now.
New Series: Visualization for Machine Learning
Speaking of series, I have just started a new one. This time the main topic is the use of visualization to understand and validate machine learning models. This series has been brewing for a long time and has a special value because I have also been doing research in this area for several years. A couple of years ago, I taught a PhD-level special topics course on this same topic, and since then, I have been collecting draft notes and thinking about eventually publishing a series. Now, I found the courage to start it. The first post introduces the topic and provides an overview of future posts I plan to publish.
The next post is almost ready. I will focus on who needs visualization for machine learning and provide an overview of the main stakeholders. Stay tuned for more to come! Getting your feedback on this series is even more crucial than usual. This series is longer and more complex than the previous one, and I really need to help my readers understand if it’s going in the right direction.
FILWD Reading Club
Another great event that happened in March was the first FILW reading club. I met with a set of FILWD readers to discuss three selected papers on visualization literacy tests. This was a sort of pilot test to see if it makes sense to expand the reading club to more and more readers. I think this first test went really well and I am now about to organize the second one. If you missed my post on the first reading class, I suggest you take a look. You can find a description in the link below.
If you did not receive an invite to participate in the reading clubs, do not worry, I will slowly expand invitations to more and more of my readers. For now, I decided to keep it smaller in order to make it manageable, but I am confident that I will be able to perfect the format and expand it to my whole readership. In the meantime, if you really can’t wait and want to be on the reading club mailing list (I have a separate one I maintain for the reading club only), leave a comment in this post by clicking on the button below, and I will add you.
Miscellaneous
Last month I was very excited about my experiments with videos. I wanted to do more in March but I was not able to record any videos. My plan is to get back to recording more videos as soon as the semester ends here at Northeastern. Here we are lucky enough to be done by the end of April, so we have about another month to wait. Almost there!
On a similar note, I was not able to make progress on the RhetVis course I have been working on. Similarly to what I mentioned above, I plan to publish more videos in May once the semester ends. If you want to see the videos I have recorded so far, you can look at my Loom library and my YouTube channel (subscribe to see updates once I start recording new videos).
Before concluding, I want to mention I started reading Cal Newport’s “Slow Productivity” in March, and I am loving it. In the book, Cal advocates for a slower and more meaningful kind of productivity. This message resonates very well with me and what I am doing with FILWD. I write this newsletter very much in the spirit Cal proposes in his book. It’s more about long-term productivity. It’s more about consistency than big sprints. It’s more about quality than volume. My hope is that this transpires from the things I write here. In any case, I highly recommend the book if you think you might be interested in the topic. I am a big fan of Cal’s “Deep Work,” which had a big impact on the way I work and organize my life, and “Slow Productivity” is a fantastic upgrade. Let me know if you read it!
March Posts
Here are the posts I published in March.
I am looking forward to posting new articles in FILWD and receiving your comments and recommendations. The interactions here are growing and I encourage you to reach out to me when you read a new post. My hope is that FILWD can become an interactive platform for the exchange of ideas about data thinking and data visualization.
Thanks for reading! 🙏