Name: A Year in Data
Start: 2022-12-05T18:30:00Z
End: 2022-12-05T21:00:00Z
Location: Darwin Building, Lecture Theatre B40

A Year in Data

UCL Social Data Institute

Join us for an evening with the experts who communicate the news through data and visualisation.

Darwin Building, Lecture Theatre B40

2022 has been a monumental year, with a seemingly endless stream of major news events. Join us for an evening with the experts who communicate this news through data and visualisation. You will hear from Ben Walker (New Statesman) about the state of public opinion. Olivia Vane (The Economist) will walk us through an interactive data project that incorporated sounds and images from Spotify, and we will also be joined by Sam Joiner, Alexandra Heal and Dan Clark from the Financial Times who will talk about data-driven war reporting using drones, maps and satellite imagery.James Cheshire (UCL Social Data Institute) will round off the evening with a discussion and some thoughts about what developments in data and visualisation we might look forward to in 2023. Date: Monday 5th December 2022Start Time: The event will start at 18:30 with arrivals from 18:00 with a bar open (please note the bar will accept card payments only). Address: University College London, Darwin Building, Lecture Theatre B40, 99 - 105 Gower Street, London, England, WC1EMap: What3Words - <a href="https://w3w.co/almost.verse.input" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">almost.verse.input</a>Please note: Please be aware this event is by registration only and that the capacity at the venue is limited.Accessibility:
Please note the venue is fully accessible with lifts and accessible seating. If you require accessible seating, please do contact: <a href="https://mailto:ucl.soda@ucl.ac.uk" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">ucl.soda@ucl.ac.uk </a>so we can make sure to reserve you the correct seat. Should you have any additional access requirements please do not hesitate to be in touch.

Speaker Biographies

Ben Walker — Co-Founder of Britain Elects and Senior Data Journalist for the New StatesmanBen Walker didn’t finish university, but long before he even started at the University of Chester he co-founded Britain Elects – a site set up initially to cover the ever-present but oft-unreported council by-elections held across Great Britain. Britain Elects now however covers all manner of things, from public-opinion polls to election forecasting. Ben became a data journalist in 2020, one month before the UK’s Covid-19 lockdown and has written extensively on attitudes in Europe and America, built a successful forecast model for the US presidential election and has led on some of the most in-depth UK local election coverage any major publication has ever done. In 2022 he launched State of the Nation under the New Statesman brand – an off-shoot site to the magazine which zones in on illustrating the state of the UK in data-form, whether it’s NHS waiting times, youth unemployment, house prices or – indeed, a national election forecast.

Olivia Vane — Interactive data journalist at The EconomistOlivia Vane is a data visualisation designer and JavaScript engineer based in London and currently works at The Economist in the data journalism team. Much of her work has been creating visualisations of large cultural datasets, for example digitised collections of paintings, photographs, artefacts, maps, and newspapers. She was a Research Software Engineer at the British Library and The Alan Turing Institute on the 'Living with Machines' research project. She has a PhD from the Royal College of Art entitled ‘Timeline Design For Visualising Cultural Heritage Data’. She has also created visualisations for institutions including the V&amp;A Museum, the Wellcome Library and the Nordic Museum, Stockholm. Olivia is also an Ambassador and Featured Creator at Observable, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Sam Joiner - Visual storytelling at the Financial TimesSam Joiner leads the FT’s visual storytelling team, an interdisciplinary group of journalists combining data, design, coding and reporting skills. The team focus on explaining the biggest stories of the moment in visually compelling ways and using visual evidence to break stories of global significance. Prior to joining the FT, Sam worked for the Times, Microsoft and the Guardian.

Alexandra Heal - Visual storytelling at the Financial TimesAlexandra Heal is a reporter on the FT’s visual storytelling team. Previously she was an investigative reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where her series on domestic abuse by police officers won the Private Eye Paul Foot Award 2020 and led to lawyers submitting a nationwide "super-complaint" with police regulators. She previously freelanced for BBC News abroad and in the UK, and for the Guardian.

Dan Clark - Visual storytelling at the Financial TimesDan Clark is a graphics journalist on the FT’s visual storytelling team. Dan used to be an interactive journalist at the Times and before that he completed a Masters degree in Computational and Data Journalism at Cardiff University.

James Cheshire — Director of UCL Social Data InstituteJames Cheshire is Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography in the UCL Department of Geography and Director of the UCL Social Data Institute. He is co-author of a number of critically acclaimed books, most recently Atlas of the Invisible. His research focuses on the use of new forms of data for the study of social science and he has published in a range of journals on a variety of topics including the use of cycle hire schemes, the spatial analysis of surnames and new ways to visualise population data.

A Year in Data

More events from UCL Social Data Institute

Follow organisers to get events picked for you

A Year in Data

More events from UCL Social Data Institute

Follow organisers to get events picked for you

You might also like...

Browse more events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.