[Note: Sorry for the bad quality of my audio! I forgot to activate my mic and ended up recording through my AirPods. 😫]
It’s my pleasure to publish a new chat in this newsletter with Richard Brath. Richard is a Partner at Uncharted Software, and he has a long history in data science and visualization. We have known each other for many years, and I have always enjoyed talking with him. He is also the author of a very original book called “Visualizing with Text,” which he published a few years ago. The book focuses on the idea of using text as the main symbol depicting objects in a visualization and how different typographic properties of text can be used to convey information about the underlying data.
In this conversation, we explore the use of AI tools for visualizing text data. Richard has recently published a series of thought-provoking posts on this topic, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching his ideas evolve. You can find all his posts on his blog of the same name: https://richardbrath.wordpress.com/.
In our conversation, we covered the following:
Richard’s background
Initial experiments with NLP and AI tools
Using Claude AI for data visualization (with D3!)
Creating prompt templates to reuse to generate charts
Generating synthetic data sets with LLMs to create fictional data
Trying out design ideas (prototyping) before committing to something
AI tools often bring you 90% there
Plausibility of results and the challenge of verification
I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation and the screen share. Make sure to watch what Richard has been capable of producing with Claude AI and related tools.
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P.S. I will keep experimenting with this video chat format. It’s still quite rough, but I enjoy it a lot. Let me know what you think. Do you like it too? These FILWD charts are also available on Spotify. Make sure to follow the podcast there if you use Spotify!
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