Monthly Update: Feb, 2025

A month dedicated to building learning material

Hi all, it’s been a while since my last update. If you’ve been following me, you might have noticed I have been quite busy with the many learning activities I have been building. This start of the year has been completely devoted to my courses.

First, my Rhetorical Data Visualization course officially starts on February 24. If you want to participate, you can still take advantage of the 30% discount. The promotion ends on Monday. We will meet twice a week, every Monday and Thursday, for three weeks.

Last Monday, I gave a free webinar titled “Same Data, Different Charts: How Visuals Shape Data Messages.” If you want to take a look, you’ll find it on Maven. There, I also gave a preview of the Rhetorical Data Vis course. The seminar went surprisingly well. I had 385 people signed up and about 105 attending live. The Maven team tells me that normally, only 10-15% of people register to attend, so I’ll call this first webinar a big win. Also, just how cool is it that 100+ people attended live?! What I enjoyed the most was the many questions I received at the end. Despite the large number of participants, the session felt quite lively. I am looking forward to organizing more. If you have suggestions for what kind of free seminars you would like me to give, please add a comment below.

Since life was not busy enough with all of the above, I started publishing the lectures of my Information Visualization course. These are the same lectures I use in my university course. As I explained in a previous post, my goal is to recreate the course I developed several years ago for Coursera. I am posting these videos on my YouTube channel, and eventually, I plan to build a new course around them. For now, you can just watch them and learn from the videos. In the future, I plan to add live meetings, quizzes, exercises, etc. Make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channels so that you’ll get updates there too.

What’s next?

Next month I’ll be busy with delivering the RhetVis course and finishing the open lectures of the Information Visualization course. I have slowed down the pace of new/innovative posts here and I hope I’ll be able to write some.

In the back of my mind I have some ideas I really care about. I want to start a podcast series on Visualization + AI, but I am not sure I’ll be able to start working on it this month. I also want to eventually start a membership program but this needs some careful thinking and implementation and I need more time to feel confident about starting it. Of course, I still have the Visualization + Machine Learning series to finish, but I am thinking of giving a course on it next year and maype postpone the completion of the series to when I have to work on the course.

I also realized I rarely talk here about work we do in the lab at Northeastern and I’d like to make things a bit more transparent. I currently advise six PhD students and I am very excited about what they do and what we are building together. So, one idea I have it to have more posts from the lab, or maybe even record some interviews with my students. I don’t know if they can convince them to do that but I’ll try. My colleague Lace Padilla has a great video with our student Racquel, so I have some hope I’ll be able to progressively involve them (check Lace’s YT channel, it’s awesome!).