Visualized: Political Data 2015

I’m very excited to announce a new data visualization conference that will take place in Washington, DC on Thursday, May 21, 2015–Visualized: Political Data. That’s right, the folks who brought you Visualized in NYC in 2014 (on which I posted an 8-part round-up) and again this coming fall are bringing a new conference about data and data visualization, this time on politics and this time in Washington, DC.

I am really excited for this conference because I will co-host the event, along with Eric Klotz and the team at Visualized. We have been working together over the past few months to identify the top people working with political data who create the latest and best analysis and data visualizations. You can find the entire line-up over at the conference website and it includes some great speakers: Ben Casselman from 538, Chris Cillizza from the Washington Post, Alyson Hurt from NPR, Derek Willis from the New York Times, and many others.

I’m doubly excited because I’m teaming up with Visualized to teach two, half-day data visualization workshops the day before the conference. But that’s not all! My colleague Ben Chartoff will be teaching alongside me with two, half-day courses on programming for the web. Each workshop will be 3 hours long and will take place at the Uber Offices shared workspace in downtown DC.

We’ve broken down the workshops as follows:

• In the first track, I will teach an Introduction to Data Visualization on Wednesday morning. Bring your computers and your critical eye because we will be talking about data visualization strategies and best practices.
• In the afternoon, I will teach an Introduction to Data Visualization in Excel in which I’ll demonstrate a variety of Excel formulas and shortcuts. I will then show you how to extend your data visualization skills in the program. Don’t forget to bring your computer because this will be a working session.
• In the second track, Ben will begin his day by teaching Introductory Programming for the Web. In it, he will introduce you to the Python programming language and basic programming concepts such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
• In the afternoon, Ben will teach Grabbing Data from the Web: Scraping and APIs. Here, Ben will teach you to scrape data from a single webpage in Javascript and Python. Again, bring your computers for both sessions as they will be hands-on,

You don’t need to register in a single track. If you already know Python, but are not so no sharp on data visualization, sign up for my morning class and Ben’s afternoon class. If you want to get better at data visualization in Excel and also add Python to your list of tools, take Ben’s morning class and my afternoon class.

More information about these workshops, including fees and directions, can be found on this Eventbrite page.

If you can’t make it to the workshops, I hope to see you at the first-ever Visualized: Political Data conference.