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: Data centers

Solving the problem of where to store huge amounts of data

This week, we look at the problem of too much government data, and companies beginning to build air-economized data centers (some in barns!). Plus: a few suggestions for pre-Strata reading on big data.

Strata Week: Shop 'til you drop

Stack Exchange goes in-house, Netflix pays for platforms, survey data gets visualized, and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace

In this edition of Strata Week: Stack Exchange takes their hardware and software in-house; Neflix explains their adoption of AWS and open source; the New York Times maps out survey and census data; and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace.

Strata Week: Shop ’til you drop

Stack Exchange goes in-house, Netflix pays for platforms, survey data gets visualized, and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace

In this edition of Strata Week: Stack Exchange takes their hardware and software in-house; Neflix explains their adoption of AWS and open source; the New York Times maps out survey and census data; and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace.

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.