Julie Steele
Julie Steele is the Content Editor for Strata at O’Reilly Media. She is co-author of Beautiful Visualization and Designing Data Visualizations. She finds beauty in exploring complex systems, and thinks in metaphors. The best part of her day is finding patterns across verticals and traditional silos, and connecting people who are working on similar problems in seemingly unrelated areas. She is particularly drawn to the visual medium as a way to understand and transmit information.
Julie holds a Master’s degree in Political Science (International Relations) from Rutgers University in Newark. She lives in New York City, where she cooks, reads, designs, and practices yoga.
Strata Week: Running the numbers
IA Ventures success, MathJax display engine, statistical literacy, and making big data more human
IA Ventures raises a huge first-time fund; MathJax provides an open source mathematical display engine; Kevin Drum shares 10 statistics pitfalls; and Paul Bradshaw explains how to bring big data down to a human scale.
Strata Week: Replaced by robots
Robo-journalism, digital fingerprinting, decentralized soldier networks, and drag-and-drop data retrieval.
In the latest Strata Week: StatSheet automates short sports articles, BlueCava uniquely identifies devices, ALADDIN implements distributed decision-making, and Needle helps you find just the data you're looking for.
Strata Week: Keeping it clean
Great data tools for R and Clojure, identifying shady Twitter memes, distributed data in Zambia, and cleaning mashed-up datasets
Red-R provides a GUI for the powerful statistics of R while Webmine makes HTML handling a breeze in Clojure; the Truthy project looks at suspicious Twitter memes; CouchDB helps provide healthcare in rural Zambia; and Google Refine cleans and sanitizes your datasets with ease.
Strata Week: Political lessons from data land
Yelp's MRJob goes open source, CODATA catalogues historical data, one more telecom lawsuit, and Expedia cleans up their UI
In the latest Strata Week: Yelp makes MRJob open source; CODATA wants to inventory "threatened data"; a visualization untangles a telecom lawsuit; and analytics and a simple fix nets $12 million for Expedia.
Strata Week: Statistically speaking
Trading platforms, truth in graphs, European financial stats, and Mandelbrot's passing.
In this edition of Strata Week: The London Stock Exchange moves from .Net to open source; learn how graphical scales can lie; the Euroean Central Bank president calls for better financial statistics; and we bid farewell to the father of fractals.
Strata Week: Videos and visualization
Data viz for journalism, student career paths, multi-dimensional data, and the future.
Get cozy for fall by watching some videos about visualization. First, check out Geoffrey McGhee's documentary about data viz in journalism. Then get a sneek preview of LinkedIn's Career Explorer tool. Catch up on Julia Grace's Web2.0 Expo keynote, and finally, take a look at the future of user interfaces through touchable holograms.
Strata Week: Grabbing a slice
Digits of pi, extruding images with iPads, and mapping the past on top of the present
In this edition of Strata Week: The 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi is calculated with an assist from Hadoop and MapReduce; a new technique uses iPads to extrude light paintings across a long exposure shot; Historypin links historical photos to Google Street View shots; and this is the last week for Strata Conference proposal submissions.
Strata Week: Money, mayhem, and media
LAPD goes precog, Mint shares its data, journalists get a new data viz tool.
In this week's data roundup: The LAPD gets ahead of crime with "predictive policing" techniques, Mint shares large quantities of consumer financial data, compression technology patents coming up for auction, FlowingMedia releases a vizualization tool for journalists, and Ellen Miller questions the federal government's commitment to data transparency initiatives.
The cut-free autopsy
How data and digital imaging are shaping virtual autopsies -- an excerpt from "Beautiful Visualization."
Postmortem visualization may prove to be a crucial tool in shaping tomorrow’s healthcare. In this excerpt from Beautiful Visualization, Anders Persson of Linköping University explains how digital imaging allows medical practitioners to conduct virtual autopsies without invasive instruments.
Redesigning the New York City subway map
The long and complicated path that led to Eddie Jabbour's KickMap.
The field of data visualization is much broader than most people conceive of it, and exploring this breadth was one of our primary goals in compiling the projects described in Beautiful Visualization. In the following excerpt, KickMap designer Eddie Jabbour explains the complexity he faced and the trade-offs he made while reinventing one of the most iconic maps in the world.
