Writing

Bio+Viz in da ‘berg

Give up those full hue heat map colors! Make images of biological data that even a grandmother can love! How about posters that no longer require an advanced degree to decipher? These platitudes and more coming next March, when I’ll be giving a keynote at the EMBO Workshop on Visualizing Biological Data in Heidelberg. Actually, I won’t be talking about any of those three things (though there’s a good chance I’ll talk about things like this), but registration is now open for participants:

Dear colleagues,

We invite you to participate in the first EMBO Workshop on Visualizing Biological Data (VizBi) 3 – 5 March 2010 at the EMBL’s new Advanced Training Centre in Heidelberg, Germany.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together, for the first time, researchers developing and using visualization systems across all areas of biology, including genomics, sequence analysis, macromolecular structures, systems biology, and imaging (including microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging). We have assembled an authoritative list of 29 invited speakers who will present an exciting program, reviewing the state-of-the-art and perspectives in each of these areas. The primary focus will be on visualizing processed and annotated data in their biological context, rather than on processing of raw data.

The workshop is limited in the total number participants, and each participant is normally required to present a poster and to give a ‘fastforward’ presentation about their work (limited to 30 seconds and 1 slide).

To apply to join the workshop, please go to http://vizbi.org and submit an abstract and image related to your work. Submissions close on 16 November 2009. Since places are limited, participants will be selected based on the relevance of their work to the goals of the workshop.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent within three weeks after the close of submissions.

We plan to award a prize for the submitted image that best conveys a strong scientific message in a visually compelling manner.

Please forward this announcement to anyone who may be interested. We hope to see you in Heidelberg next spring!

Seán O’Donoghue, EMBL
Jim Procter, University of Dundee
Nils Gehlenborg, European Bioinformatics Institute
Reinhard Schneider, EMBL

If you have any questions about the registration process please contact:

Adela Valceanu

Conference Officer
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Meyerhofstr. 1
D-69117 Heidelberg
Tel: +49-6221-387 8625
Fax: +49-6221-387 8158
Email: valceanu@embl.de

For full event listings please visit our website or sign up for our newsletter.

Which also reminds me, I oughta finish cooking a few back-burner genetics projects before they go bad…

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 | science, talk  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.