It pains me to admit it, but even though I had visited their site, created an account, and played around with their tools, I didn’t really get the value proposition behind Plot.ly. I already use ggplot, bokeh, and d3.js, I already use knitr and ipython notebooks, so why do I need a new way of posting my plots on a web page?
Last week, I got the opportunity to share the highlights from the eyeo festival at the DataVis LA meetup. The eyeo festival is a yearly event held in Minneapolis that draws together artists, technologists, designers, and many more people who work with art and computers. As I said in the meetup description, a lot of the things that caught my eye this year could be described better by the term “art” than straight “data visualization,” although there’s usually both at the festival. I also really liked that this year’s festival emphasized the history of computer art and data visualization. By bringing in Frieder Nake, Lillian Schwartz, and Roman Verostko, the organizers grounded us in the history that started in the 1960s.
