Hi Everyone! We have Jon Schwabish on the show in this episode. Jon is an economist who specializes in data visualization for politics and economics. You can see some of his work in the blog he writes called Policyviz.

We invited him to talk about his recent new initiative called HelpMeViz, a web site where people can send requests to visualize some data of interest or redesign some particularly tricky charts. The web site quickly gained some momentum and already publishes quite a nice set of charts, suggested redesigns, and most of all very insightful discussions (it’s not just the usual I like this, I like that). There is a lot to learn there.

In the interview we talk about how HelpMeViz was born, how it works, what kind of entries they have been published so far and how it’s going to evolve. Give a look to HelpMeViz and submit your own charts and data there!

Links

• How HelpMeViz works …
• Jon’s “An Economist’s Guide to Visualizing Data” (full of very nice examples of chart redesign)
• Interesting discussions from HelpMeViz:
  • Budget Pie Chart Triplet
  • State Migration Flows
  • Debate About Colors

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And here’s another piece of great news: For the first time, this episode was audio edited and annotated by a volunteer helper – woo! Fabricio Tavares was kind to help us. Thanks a million! The equation is simple: less audio editing work for Moritz means more episodes we can do in a year. Get in touch in case you would like help us, too!