The New York City chapter of Hacks / Hackers met on Nov. 9th for a jam packed information session on information and data visualization. The four presenters covered the gamut of information visualization, from online data-viz products, to just launched prototypes, to critical analyses of how graphics are being used in the media.

The four speakers for the evening included Marc Rueter from Tableau Software, Matthew Ericson from the New York Times, Alex Lundry from TargetPoint Consulting, and Santiago Ortiz from Bestiario.

Marc kicked off the presentations by talking about Tableau’s mission to democratize data publishing and visualization online using Tableau Public, their online tool. He demoed the tool showing how easily data could be imported and dragged and dropped to create different views (he chose a dataset on bird strikes to airplanes in honor of his trip to New York). A lot of journalists are turning to Tableau Public to support their data-based reporting and it’s easy to see why: the tool is slick, it’s point and click, and the results are embeddable and look great online. Here are some examples using it.

Matt Ericson, the Deputy Graphics Director at the New York Times, then took the stage to talk about how the NYT designed their election graphics for the just completed election season. There are a lot of challenges to doing real-time data driven graphics for election night, among them is thinking about the visual design for dynamic results and providing insight into undecided races as new information is released. Among the visuals that Matt talked about was a new tool they developed expressly for helping people compare results from past elections, which really gives a sense of how voting patterns have changed (see below).

All of the NYT election graphics are still online here. The platform is implemented with data from the AP, an in-house flash library for the mapping, Ruby on Rails to bake pages to .html (for faster loading) and everything is hosted on EC2 for mass scalability.

To contrast the objective and news-y graphics of the New York Times, Alex Lundry then took the floor to present his ideas on the inherent subjectivity and manipulability of information graphics. He showed some fantastic examples of data visualization being used as a tool of political persuasion (and yes, people with information graphic laden picket signs). Below is the masterpiece which sparked a partisan visualization volley Alex calls Chart Wars. Alex gave a powerful and dynamic talk, waking the crowd up to how shapes, color, and iconography can be used to bias graphics, and how point-of-view journalism is invading the ostensible objective realm of data visualization.

The presentations were closed out by Santiago Ortiz who demoed a practically brand-spanking-new visualization environment called impure. In contrast to the non-programmer approach to visualization taken by Tableau, Impure is oriented more toward the gear-heads. For anyone who’s done music programming with Max MSP, it’s that, but for data visualization. It has a powerful data flow model (which might be recognizable to someone who’s used Yahoo Pipes) which lets programmers connect data sources to filters, tables, and interactive visualizations.

Sign-up for the beta release at impure.com.

The program for the night was co-organized by Hacks / Hackers’ @hoenikker and the NYViz Groups’ @jpmarcum and was sponsored by Tableau Software and Dogpatch Labs. For those who missed it the video of the event can still be found online via Livestream.