Podcast Season Finale

PolicyViz Newsletter #55

Well, summer is definitely here. It was super hot in Virginia this past week (though I missed it because I was in Japan attending a conference on augmented multimodel interaction for presentations and collaborations, so there). Among other things, with summer comes a break in the PolicyViz Podcast. I’m up to 265 episodes now, published over the last decade.

This season was equally fun and really challenging. It’s really hard to break through in the podcast market and I don’t expect a niche show on data visualization to grab one of the top spots on the iTunes list. But making it available and known to people—a true marketing challenge—is not easy.

Aside from finding interviewees and conducting the interview, the audio and video both need to be edited; social media images need to be created; the surrounding blog post and text need to be written; and various tags and keywords need to be listed. Overall, I’d say—in addition to the basic scheduling and interview, and not including the audio editing (which I have done by a professional)—the rest of it takes me between about 90 and 120 minutes to complete.

And in case you’re wondering, here are the tools I use:

• Zencastr for recording and posting.

• Camtasia for editing the video. I’m thinking of testing out Descript and Screen Studio this summer.

• Canva for the social media content including Instagram and LinkedIn images.

• Camtasia and Lemon Squeezy to help find sponsors.

• TubeBuddy to create useful tags and keywords on YouTube.

I hope you have enjoyed the show this season—there are two new episodes out since my last newsletter—and will continue to listen and recommend to others.

Expect a few more newsletters over the summer. I’ve got a few things I’m thinking about (yaxis positioning; data physicalization; publishing in academic journals) and some fun things in the works that I’ll want to share.

I hope you have a great, safe, and healthy summer,

Jon

Podcast: Bridging Data Gaps: Nancy Organ on Making Data Visualization Accessible for All Ages

In this final episode of the season, I welcome Nancy Organ to the show to discuss her new book Data Visualization for People of All Ages. Nancy’s book aims to make dataviz accessible to everyday readers. Our conversation highlights the importance of not altering data simply for aesthetics but to facilitate understanding. We also explore balancing creativity with informed design choices, and suggest alternatives to traditional graphs, such as infographics, timelines, flowcharts, and diagrams.

Data with Heart: Giorgia Lupi’s Journey from Visualization to Human Connection

Georgia Lupi joins the show to discuss her work in data visualization, her journey from Accurat to Pentagram, and how she takes a human-centric perspective to working with and communicating data. Giorgia shares her experience with long COVID, explaining how she collected her own data to better explore and understand her illness. She advocates for engaging storytelling through visual design, exploring approaches beyond traditional bar and pie charts. Our conversation also focuses on her new book, “This is Me and Only Me.” The book encourages kids to observe and collect data to understand emotions and human questions, using symbols and colors to express emotions. Giorgia hopes the book will inspire kids and adults to be imaginative, observant, and mindful. We also have some breaking news on this episode because Giorgia is working on another big project, a new book called “Speak Data” that explores data as a language intersecting various fields.

Things I’m Reading & Watching

Books

• Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics, Nathan Yau

• Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, Jessica Calarco

• Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap, Louise Story and Ebony Reed

Articles

• Integrating Sonification and Visualization – But Why?, Rind et al. (2024)

• KiriPhys: Exploring New Data Physicalization Opportunities, Daneshzand, Perin, and Carpendale (2017)

• SpeechMirror: A Multimodal Visual Analytics System for Personalized Reflection of Online Public Speaking Effectiveness, Huang et al. (2023)

TV, Movies, Music, and Miscellaneous

• Shogun, Hulu

• The Bear, Hulu

• Eric, Netflix

• The Hit Man, Netflix

• The Acolyte, Disney+

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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