Monthly Update: June, 2024
VisML series, FILWD reading club, AI and Visualization, Video Experiments, Etc.
Hello folks! Wow, we are in June already! Time runs so fast! Finally, we had a few really nice sunny days here ☀️, and my Italian soul is getting some recovery from the New England Spring gloom.
With the end of the semester approaching in May, I was really hoping I could focus on some projects. However, I had a huge backlog, and I feel like my calendar and agenda are getting a bit lighter now.
Looking back at this semester, I am proud I could keep this newsletter growing and going with almost no glitches (while taking care of all my job duties). I posted one post every week without failure. I was less active on social media, but the numbers are growing steadily, and we are a pretty large group already.
May has been a pretty eclectic month for FILWD. I posted a very diverse set of posts, but I am happy about them because they reflect the many ways I am trying to experiment and produce value with the newsletter.
VisML series
Early in May, I posted a new post for the series on Visualization for Machine Learning.
This is the first post of the series that focuses entirely on visualization, and I am quite happy about its final shape. I am doing my best to organize the content to make this material durable, which means I must focus on the concepts as much as possible rather than providing a long list of techniques and tools.
The next post will be on “machine learning explanations.” I originally imagined covering this part in only one post, but it seems like I will need at least two separate ones. Making progress on these new posts has been harder than usual because I had a lot of important things to focus on, but I am confident I’ll be able to post at least one more post for the series in June.
FILWD reading club
The reading club experiment is moving forward. I am happy to announce that we will have the third reading club in a few days (June 6) and that the number of participants is growing. For this third event, we will focus on a paper on “Visualization Mirages,” a great paper exploring the idea that visualizations often can depict data in completely misleading ways.
As mentioned before, I am keeping the reading club small because I am still experimenting with its format (if you want to participate, write a comment to this post, and I’ll send you the details). For this third round, I decided to focus on one single paper rather than two, and I suspect it will make the whole discussion much easier and more relaxed. As usual, I will report on how it went and provide a summary of the most interesting ideas discussed in the meeting. A few weeks ago I published a report about the second reading club, where we discussed two papers on data visualization literacy in elementary school.
When I started the reading club, I planned to organize three editions and then reflect on how to scale them further and make them a permanent feature of the newsletter. I do not have definite ideas yet, but you’ll hear from me about the future of reading clubs once the third one is done. If you have any ideas or recommendations, please let me know.
AI and Visualization
You may have noticed that AI keeps being a main theme in the newsletter. In April, virtually everything I posted was related to AI, and in May, I had a few more AI-related posts. Other than the VisML post, I had a post on using ChatGPT for data analysis and a video chat I recorded with Amanda Makulec (Director of the Data Visualization Society) on using AI in data analysis and visualization.
I never planned to make AI such a central theme of the newsletter, but there’s so much going on in this space that it’s very hard to avoid it. I can’t tell how much more AI you will see here, but I am excited by my initial experiment with ChatGPT and curious to explore and report more. The video I recorded was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot, so there is a good chance I will record more.
Experimenting with videos
You may have noticed I am experimenting more with the video format. I am learning to produce different types of content and use video productively without being overwhelming. I am very happy with the “quick video chat” format. The chat with Amanda went really well and was completely unstructured. I now want to try a few more. What do you think? Do you like the format?
Recording myself performing data analysis was a bit of a crazy experiment, but I think it turned out well. I want to keep experimenting with this. I have an idea for another data set to explore. Stay tuned!
Plans for June
I’d like to return to my Rhetorical Data Visualization video lectures this month. I promised many times to finish recording them, but I got sidetracked. Now I have time to work on them, so you’ll definitely see some updates. Next semester, I will teach this course at Northeastern again, so the course will continue developing. I am very excited to go to class again and work on the topics covered in this course. In June, I also definitely need to publish at least one next post on the VisML series. I want to finalize the series over the summer; there is much work to do. As usual, I may come up with other ideas and experiments in the meantime, but these two projects will be my main focus for the month.
Help me grow FILWD!
If you like my work here, I would appreciate it if you could help me spread the word about this newsletter. If you find a post interesting, please like it and share it on your social media. You can also let your friends and colleagues know they can sign up for the newsletter. Finally, I am always happy to hear what you think about my posts, so do leave comments whenever you can. Thanks! 🙏