Spring 2025
👨🏫 I'm teaching Stats 198 Interactive Data Science and Visualization at UC Berkeley! Related materials:
Watch this space for recordings, exercises, and other creative commons materials. Thank you to some organizations which provided support: The Schmidt Center for Data Science and the Environment at UC Berkeley, The Fung Fellowship at UC Berkeley, the open source Zulip project, and the Sketchingpy open source project.
Why
Learn new technical data visualization skills including essential libraries and engineering techniques. Gain new important design perspectives and frameworks for building interactive data experiences. Unlock new insight into your own data and become an expert storyteller in sharing your work visually / interactively with others.
Data are essential to how we experience and understand the world. The way we interact with tools, analyses, and simulations all change the insights we learn, the stories we tell, the actions we take, who is included, and what is left out. My teaching combines traditional user experience and information design (data visualization) with interactive storytelling and video game design.
I hope we will explore how to:- Build data visualizations and other interactive experiences to share your findings with others.
- Invite your audience in as co-creators to build new meaning alongside you in your work, building collaboration between users and AI / machine learning for solution design and decision support.
- Craft tools which help both you and your users navigate data-heavy tasks and uncover insights.
- Tell impactful stories that engage your readers emotionally through data.
- Incorporate ethics and accessibility into your data visualization work.
For scientists
I would love to explore together how you might build tools which give you superpowers in your own analysis. I also hope this material helps you effectively share insights with others and even invite them in as co-creators to find new meaning or ask new questions. Finally, the ambition of this teaching is that you can better engage policy makers, business professionals, artists, and other scientists to help them both love and more deeply understand your work.
For storytellers
For artists and journalists, I hope we may explore how to engage data, science, and simulation in your storytelling. Find new ways to interact with audiences and create responsive pieces that invite participation. The ambition of this material is that you may learn how to weave data into broader narratives that address critical issues in new ways.
For engineers
I hope we may explore how to design and build flexibile and inviting data-intensive experiences alongside users in iterative and collaborative ways. The aim of this material is that you may build new techniques to engage your users that allow them to become more active participants or even authors, extending the impact and utility of your creations.
For mathematicians
I hope we may create new tools that help you and others better reason about systems and solutions. Together we will explore creating interactive media that not only expertly convey findings but also enable deeper reasoning that build new perspectives on results.
Upcoming
I am excited to offer multiple opportunities for the University of California community to learn more about interactive data science. I hope you can join me in exploring how these techniques can complement your work and expertise! Get notified about upcoming courses and workshops.[Course] Interactive Data Science and Visualization (Spring 2025)
I plan to teach both to undergraduate and graduate students in Spring 2025 as a staff DeCal on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3pm to 4pm. This offering only requires some kind of prior programming experience (even if it is just one course!) as prerequisite. We will walk through the fundamentals of data visualization and traditional information design before branching out into video game design and interactive storytelling. This will be a full hands-on broadly applicable course that will empower participants to craft powerful interactive experiences to more deeply engage audiences in data, science, computation, and simulation. See PDF curriculum, Course Manual, and sign up form!
Materials
I have some materials from prior engagements available online.[PDF] Spring 2025 Curriculum
I am excited to be teaching Interactive Data Science and Visualization for Spring 2025. See PDF download.
[PDF] Spring 2025 Course Manual
For those interested in following along, the Course Manual offers further details on what we will cover for the Spring 2025 course.
[PDF] Prior Curricula
Draft curricula for my interactive data science course. Currently being revised for Spring 2025. Available as a PDF download.See also the sign up form
[Video + Slides] 4 Perspectives on Data Visualization (EcoTech)
Workshop on different perspectives into what data visualization is and how to do it well. An introductory talk given to ESPM focused on scientists looking to bring data visualization into their work, this provides an overview of some of the big ideas in data visualization / interactive science. This 30 minutes can help you start your journey. A rehearsal recording and slides available. The later include details on the interactive section.
[Slides] Data Science for System Design
Guest lecture given to a systems design course at UC Berkeley about how data science, information, and game design can help understand and take action within complex systems. Slides are available.
[Video] Visualizing Systems
Guest lecture given to a systems design course at Stanford looking at visualization for systems. A talk rehersal recording is available.
[Video + Slides] Thinking Through Tools
Talk (Thinking Through Visualization Tools) given to the Data Visualization Society Bay Area group. Discussion of the different philosophies embedded in visualization tools and how those perspectives influence the work built with them. A talk recording and slides are available.