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Data@Urban Digital Discussions
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As the amount and availability of data grows rapidly, being able to visualize and communicate data and data analysis has become increasingly important. Organizations tasked with producing, releasing, and analyzing large amounts of data can more effectively do so by understanding how to visualize their data. In this ongoing virtual series, Urban Institute senior fellow Jonathan Schwabish chats with leaders in data communication about how to improve the ways they visualize, present, and analyze their data.

These casual chats start with a conversation between Jon and the guest and are then opened up to attendees. All discussions are recorded for later viewing.

 

Previous discussions


Nigel Holmes | Thursday, March 19, 2:00–3:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
To kick things off, Jon is joined by Nigel Holmes, a graphic designer, author, and theorist. You might know him from his work at Time magazine. Nigel is the perfect guest to premiere this Discussion series because he can talk about teaching data visualization and design to kids. @nigelblue

Ann Emery | Friday, March 20, 1:00–2:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Jon’s friend Ann Emery joined to talk about her dataviz work, travel, and creating good-looking reports. And because Ann has her own great virtual classes, they talk about what it takes to have an awesome home office and webinar setup. @AnnKEmery

RJ Andrews | Monday, March 23, 3:00–4:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Author RJ Andrews joined the Discussion series to talk about his new Kickstarter campaign for his cool California map, plus whatever weird and arcane topic is at the top of his mind. @infowetrust

Allison Feldman | Tuesday, March 24, 2:00–3:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Allison is a design specialist at the Urban Institute. Jon and Allison chat about her design work and her love of Figma. They also talk about her cover design for the recently-published Elevate the Debate book. Allison at the Urban Institute.

Andy Kirk | Wednesday, March 25, 10:00–11:00 a.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Data visualization specialist Andy Kirk joins the Discussion series to talk about his work, his data visualization roundups, and much more. Lots to cover. @visualisingdata

Harry Stevens | Thursday, March 26, 2:00–3:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
If you haven’t seen Harry Stevens’s great new animated and interactive data visualization about COVID-19 at the Washington Post, you’re missing out. Harry will talk about the project and maybe give a behind-the-scenes look. @Harry_Stevens

Echo Rivera | Friday, March 27, 12:00–1:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Echo helps people create better reports and presentations. She has a number of virtual webinars, so, among other things, we’ll spend some time talking about how to work better when you’re home. @echoechoR

Graham MacDonald and Claire Bowen | Monday, March 30, 1:00–2:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Graham is the chief data scientist and Claire is the lead data scientist for privacy and data security at the Urban Institute. We’ll talk about their current work and how they’re helping researchers understand data security and privacy in the age of big data. @GrahamIMac @ClaireMKBowen

Rob Santos and Diana Elliott | Tuesday, March 31, 4:00–5:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Rob Santos is chief methodologist and a vice president at the Urban Institute, and Diana Elliott is a senior research associate in Urban’s Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population. Last year, they published several products about the 2020 Census. We’ll talk about their work and how the coronavirus pandemic threatens the census. @_Rob_Santos @dianabelliott

Manuel Lima | Wednesday, April 1, 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Manuel Lima is the author of three books and a leading voice on information visualization. He has worked with an array of organizations designing digital experiences and leading product teams. We’ll talk about his love of circles and trees, and more. @mslima

Gregor Aisch and Lisa Charlotte Rost | Thursday, April 2, 10:00–11:00 a.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Gregor Aisch is cofounder and chief technology officer at Datawrapper, a data visualization charting tool based in Berlin, and Lisa Charlotte Rost is a designer and blogger at Datawrapper. We’ll talk about the current and future state of Datawrapper and similar tools and answer all your Datawrapper questions. @lisacrost @driven_by_data

Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner | Friday, April 3, 2:00–3:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Enrico Bertini is an associate professor at New York University, and Moritz Stefaner works as a “truth and beauty operator” in data visualization from his home in Germany. Together, Enrico and Moritz host the Data Stories podcast. We’ll talk about what they’re doing now and how they blazed the trail for podcasts about data visualization. @FILWD @moritz_stefaner

Dan Roam | Tuesday, April 7, 3:00–4:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Dan Roam is the author of five international bestselling books on business visualization and helps people and organizations discover how to make complex things clear. Come ask Dan all your burning questions about visualizing complicated data and making those visuals easier to understand. @dan_roam

Teaching Data Viz to Kids | Wednesday, April 8, 11:00–12:00 p.m. EDT
Urban Institute senior fellow Jon Schwabish will teach data visualization to kids! The session will start with a short presentation about maps, and then we’ll start making some data visualizations. All your kids need is paper and some colored pencils. @jschwabish

Nadieh Bremer | Thursday, April 9, 10:00–11:00 a.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Nadieh Bremer is a freelance data visualization designer and artist, working from a small town near Amsterdam. She has a background in data science and astronomy, and she now spends her time creating beautiful data visualization projects, among other things. Come ask about Nadieh work and her process. @NadiehBremer

Catherine D’Iganzio and Lauren Klein | Friday, April 10, 11:30–12:30 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Catherine D’Iganzio and Lauren Klein, authors of the new book, Data Feminism, will talk about their work and their book. We’ll talk about good and bad data and the ways we, as data consumers and producers, can more carefully work with data. @kanarinka @laurenfklein

Kassia St. Clair | Wednesday, April 15, 10:00-11:00 a.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Kassia St. Clair is a writer based in London. Her first bestselling book, The Secret Lives of Color, tells the unusual stories and tales of 75 different shades, dyes, and hues. Her latest book, The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History, covers the 30,000-year history of fabric throughout human history. This promises to be a fun chat, so come and ask Kassia about her work, her process, and why different color combinations work (or don’t). @kassiastclair

Mike Bostock | Friday, April 17, 4:30-5:30 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Mike Bostock cocreated Observable and is one of the key developers of D3.js, a JavaScript library used for producing dynamic, interactive, online data visualizations. Come chat with Mike about the roots of D3 and the future of computational notebooks. @mbostock

Michael Correll, Jessica Hullman, and Robert Kosara | Tuesday, April 21, 12:00-1:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Kicking off the sixth week of the Data@Urban digital discussion series, we will talk about how the academic data visualization field views the COVID-19 pandemic and how we should all think about data visualization, uncertainty, and more. Michael Correll and Robert Kosara are research scientists at Tableau Software and Jessica Hullman is the Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at Northwestern University. @JessicaHullman @eagereyes​

CANCELED: Michael Brenner | Wednesday, April 22, 1:00-2:00 p.m. EDT
Michael Brenner is the head of design at Data4Change, which helps civil society organizations create data-driven advocacy projects. Data4Change links up local groups with global and local experts in data, design, technology, and journalism to help fuel change. @contentcontext1

Tom Mock | Thursday, April 23, 3:00-4:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Tom Mock works on the customer success team at RStudio. He founded and organizes the #TidyTuesday project that helps people improve their tidyverse and R skills. @thomas_mock

Michael Brenner | Wednesday, May 6, 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Michael Brenner is the head of design at Data4Change, which helps civil society organizations create data-driven advocacy projects. Data4Change links local groups with global and local experts in data, design, technology, and journalism to help fuel change. @contentcontext1

Douglas W. Elmendorf | Thursday, May 7, 1:00–2:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Douglas W. Elmendorf is the dean of faculty and Don K. Price professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Elmendorf had been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution after serving as director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2009 through 2015. His work focuses on budget policy, health care issues, Social Security, income security programs, financial markets, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting, the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy, and a range of other topics.

Claudia Sahm | Friday, May 8, 12:00–1:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Claudia Sahm is the director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. She has policy and research expertise on consumer spending, fiscal stimulus, and the financial well-being of households. @Claudia_Sahm

Douglas Holtz-Eakin | Wednesday, May 13, 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the president of the American Action Forum and was previously the chief economist of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and the sixth director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. In 2007 and 2008, he was director of domestic and economic policy for the John McCain presidential campaign. After that, he was a commissioner on the congressionally chartered Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. @djheakin

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic | Thursday, May 14, 12:00–1:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is founder and CEO of Storytelling with Data. She is the author of the best-selling books, Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals and Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice! For nearly a decade, Knaflic and her team have delivered interactive learning sessions highly sought after by data-minded individuals, companies, and philanthropic organizations all over the world. @storywithdata

Women in Tech | Tuesday, May 19, 1:00–2:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Kicking off the 10th week of the Data@Urban Digital Discussion series, we will talk with five women on the Urban Institute’s Tech and Data team about women working in the technology sector. 

  • Kara Davis is the associate director of planning and management, bringing agile practices and user-centered design principles to her work.
  • Greta Kauffman is the director of the digital workplace. She oversees remote work and virtual convening capabilities.​
  • Sybil Mendonca is a senior programmer and analyst, where she uses sophisticated modeling techniques and statistical testing to support various policy centers on econometric research.​
  • Khuloud Odeh is the vice president for technology and data science and the chief information officer, bringing a unique blend of education, IT organization leadership, change-management experience, and an understanding of global and local sustainability challenges.
  • Jamila Patterson is the technology communications specialist. She keeps Tech and Data’s initiatives running smoothly by coordinating communications and meetings with key internal and external stakeholders.

Teaching Data Viz to Kids | Tuesday, May 26, 12:00–1:00 p.m. EDT
Jon Schwabish, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, will teach data visualization to kids! The session will start with a short presentation about maps, and then we’ll start making some data visualizations. All your kids need is paper and some colored pencils. @jschwabish

Teaching Code to Kids | Wednesday, May 27, 12:00–1:00 p.m. EDT
Alphonse Simon, a research assistant in the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center, will teach kids how to code in this one-hour session. Using the Scratch online coding kit from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Simon will show kids how to get the session set up and build a simple game. Please make sure kids have an account at the Scratch website.  

Teaching Map Projections to Kids | Thursday, May 28, 12:00–1:00 p.m. EDT
Sarah Strochak is a research analyst in the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. She will teach kids the basics of mapping and explain how we represent the 3D globe on 2D surfaces. What kids need: an orange or a clementine! And if you can print, print this map to globe model, and ensure kids bring scissors and tape. @sarah_strochak

Teaching Data to Kids | Friday, May 29, 12:00–1:00 p.m. EDT
Claire Bowen is the lead data scientist for privacy and data security at the Urban Institute. In this session, kids will learn how news reporters, scientists, and other people collect, analyze, and report data. We will collect our own data to visualize and analyze before discussing how we should report our findings. We will also learn how to question what we read in the news when it comes to data. Kids should be ready with paper and colored pencils or crayons to draw our data. @ClaireMKBowen

Alberto Cairo | Tuesday, June 2, 10:00–11:00 a.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Alberto Cairo is a journalist and designer and the Knight chair in visual journalism at the University of Miami (UM) School of Communication. He is also the director of the visualization program at UM’s Center for Computational Science. Cairo has been the head of information graphics at media publications in Spain and Brazil and is the author of three books on data and data visualization. @AlbertoCairo

Molly Dahl and Mark Hadley | Wednesday, June 3, 12:00–1:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
Molly Dahl is the unit chief of the Congressional Budget Office’s Long-Term Analysis Unit, which is tasked with forecasting the finances of Social Security. Mark Hadley is chief operating officer and general counsel for the Congressional Budget Office, overseeing the agency’s ethics program, acquisitions, and much of its legal work. We will discuss the Congressional Budget Office’s role in the federal budgeting process, as well as its growing emphasis on improving how it visualizes its data and communicates its analysis.

Jon Schwabish | Thursday, June 4, 12:00–1:00 p.m. EDT | Watch Recording Here
In the final Data@Urban digital discussion, Jon Schwabish, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, will host an “ask me anything” session. Ask Schwabish about his work at Urban, data visualization principles, presentation skills, or even his reflections on the three months of digital discussions. @jschwabish
 

Until further notice, all Urban Institute events will be online or postponed.
Watch our virtual events live or come back later for the recording.

Send any inquiries regarding this event to [email protected]

Date & Time Thursday, June 4, 2020
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