Science Online Bay Area launches!
Thursday 19th April saw the launch of two more events that are replicating nature.com’s SoNYC model to other locations in the US and Canada. Following in the footsteps of Science Online Seattle (#SoSEA) and Science Online Vancouver (#SoVan), Science Online Bay Area (#SoBA) hosted a debate on the topic of data visualization and data journalism in science:
Although not yet exactly common in science reporting, data journalism and data visualization are a natural fit to the material. But how does one go beyond the use of tabular data and basic analysis to data scraping and sophisticated statistical techniques? We’ll discuss the issues, methods, and tools of data visualization and data journalism and explore the cutting edge of these fields with some of the leading practitioners in the Bay Area.
The panel included:
Peter Aldhous is San Francisco bureau chief with New Scientist magazine, reporting on biology, medicine, social sciences and the environment. He also teaches in the Science Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has developed curriculum materials in data analysis and visualization for the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Peter’s journalism has drawn on diverse sources of data, from earthquake records, through citations in stem cell research, to his own genome.
David Kroodsma is an independent climate change consultant and journalist who has spent much of the past decade communicating climate science. He recently spearheaded do-it-yourself data journalism while writing for the Climate Central, where he used basic online tools to communicate climate science to a lay audience. He is best known for a two-year bicycle trip he took from California to Argentina, and the “on the ground” climate blogging he performed along the way. He has a masters in Earth Systems science from Stanford University, and he is currently working with the Skoll Global Threats Fund.
Michael Porath heads up the Engineering team at Visual.ly. The startup creates tools that aim to democratize the creation of data visualization. Michael has a background in Software Engineering with a focus on working with large-scale data sets. He holds a Master in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley, with a specialization in Data Visualization. Michael also teaches a graduate-level course in Information Visualization at the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
To read what people on Twitter were saying about the event, check out the Storify of tweets at the bottom of this post.
Live-streaming and video archiving
Each SoBA event is live-streamed to give as many people as possible the chance to take part in the debate. You can check out this month’s livestream archive.
Finding out more
You can also check out the SoBA website and find SoBA is on Facebook – like our page and join in the sharing of conversations, or find us on Google+.