I rewrote this post 4 times, in an effort to give it a calm and professional tone. And then I thought “Ah fuck it, this is my blog and I can say whatever I want.” I’m writing this post because I just listened to an interview about data visualization. It took place among 4 men who were positioned around the globe and lasted over an hour. In that time, I didn’t hear them mention even one woman. In the references they posted, only men were listed. This post is to point attention to the awesome women in data visualization, not just out there kicking ass, but going the extra distance to show others how its done.
Bloggers with Data Viz Instructions
Ann Emery How-to instructions on dataviz best practices, coauthor of the Data Visualization Checklist, and video guides on Excel formulas
Angela Zoss So happy someone pointed me to this blog
Russian Sphinx Tableau tutorials and more
Anya A’Hearn Screenshots of how to pull together an array of tools to create powerful viz
Cole Nussbaumer Preaching the best practices, right within Excel, with downloadable template to boot
Bloggers with Data Viz Advice
Lynn Cherny She codes but her blog posts are not so much about that, rather they are excellent, thoughtful reads, including this one on starting to freelance your data viz skills
Tiffany Farrant Considerate analysis of dataviz and a monthly roundup of the cool stuff in the field, working in Illustrator
Jen Underwood Business intelligence dataviz, across several platforms
Naomi Robbins Blogging for Forbes
Jen Stirrup Writing about big data, business intelligence, and SQL (so I don’t understand half of it but the other half is awesome)
Kelly Martin Sweet Tableau advice
Caroline Ziemkiewicz Not a blogger, but published a super important paper with Robert Kosara
Andee Kaplan Teaching & blogging on dataviz with R
Designers with Inspirational Portfolios
Jen Christiansen Mainly scientific viz, lots of sankey, dot plots, inspiration
Hillary Mason What you can do with code
Rachel Binx Oh look at that coding skill!
Heather Krause Infographics, the good kind
Kim Rees Interactive dataviz central!
Meli Lewis Data scientist at Periscopic
Jane Pong Elegant infographics, made without code
Kristina Szucs Beautiful interactive displays, made me drool
Stefanie Posavec Intricate, complex, hand-made dataviz
Maral Pourkazemi Gorgeous infographics, full of graphs and none of that useless bullshit
Laura Kurgan Leading the Spatial Information Design Lab, kicking ass, taking names
Anna Powell-Smith She’s the one that made that awesome viz on dress sizes that made me want to buy a sewing machine
Iskra Velitchkova Making beautiful work at Mapacino
Kat Greenbrook Finalist in Information is Beautiful infographic contest
Uta Hinrichs Data + art in an understandable and accessible way
Isabel Meirelles Writing and research too!
Mirjam Leunissen Running Dutch Data Design
Fernanda Viegas Wow!
Putting Dataviz in the News
Lena Groeger ProPublica
Sisi Wei ProPublica
Kennedy Elliott Washington Post
Kat Downs Mulder Washington Post
Darla Cameron Washington Post
Emily Chow Washington Post
Katie Park Washington Post
Hannah Fairfield New York Times
Amanda Cox New York Times
Alicia Parlapiano New York Times
Haeyoun Park New York Times
Alicia DeSantis New York Times
Jennifer Daniel New York Times
Alexis Lloyd New York Times (R+D Lab)
Sarah Slobin Wall Street Journal
Rani Molla Wall Street Journal
Lisa Strausfeld Bloomberg
Soo Oh Chronicle Data
Lam Thuy Vo Al Jazeera
Joanna Kao Al Jazeera
Katie Peek Popular Science
Michelle Minkoff Associated Press
Kaeti Hinck MinnPost
Kelly Shea Seattle Times
Marianne Bouchart Bloomberg
Heather Billings Chicago Tribune
Speaking/Teaching on Dataviz (in addition to those above)
Mico Yuk and dashboards!
Giorgia Lupi Slides and video for some talks available
Tamara Milosevic Teaching at FDV
Petra Isenberg Publishing research on dataviz. Be still my heart.
Gaia Scagnetti Lovely viz and lots of teaching
Irene Ros Interactive datavis developer, blogger and teacher
Tamara Munzner Teaching, publishing, testing the viz world
Katy Borner Teaching and publishing, especially on maps and networks & leading IVMOOC
Dona Wong Wrote The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics
Cindy Royal Teaching at Texas State University
Julie Koesmarno Workshops on SQL
Cynthia Brewer Among other things, the brains behind my favorite site, ColorBrewer
Michelle Borkin Of that famous research study on what makes a viz memorable, plus other stuff of course
Sara Irina Fabrikant Heavy research on maps, etc.
Heike Hofmann Profing at Iowa State
Deborah Swayne Researching & publishing at AT&T labs
Dianne Cook Teaching/publishing.visualizing climate change (hell yes!)
Sheelagh Carpendale Rocking it out at the University of Calgary
Miriah Meyer Check the qualitative study on how designers design with data
Cyndey Neilsen Using dataviz to understand genomics & saving the freakin world
Susan McGregor Teaching at the Columbia Journalism School
Chrys Wu What isn’t she doing?
Jessica Hullman Speaking on design trade-offs in this cool video
Tweeting about Dataviz (in addition to those above)
That’s more than 50 females in dataviz. You can see them all in my Twitter list. And I’m sure there are many more I have missed. And if we start looking at related fields, like all the women in this geoviz list, or amazing people like my friend Kylie Hutchinson, who address dataviz in broader contexts, the list becomes massive. Which is why it’s increasingly frustrating that we are repeatedly left out of the old boys club.
So GOOD LORD how is it 2014 and one of my primary fields is so male-dominated that I still have to bring attention to badass females??? One day, I’m going to be able to delete this post because it will be obsolete.
