Data, as Art

This week I launched my latest data project and would love to tell you about it. It got a lot of traction on LinkedIn! Also, my latest newsletter issue on Shiny and Streamlit made quite a bit of noise and sparked many interesting discussions.

Let me unpack all this.

Data To Art

This week, I'm delighted to launch my latest website: data-to-art.com.

For years, I've been passionate about people who use data as a medium to create truly beautiful work.

A few months ago, I met Marthe Viallet in Paris. She's a data art curator, and we decided to combine our skills to create an online data art gallery together.

Today, it's live!

We're genuinely grateful to the 11 artists who agreed to share their work with us, and we're very much looking forward to adding many more.

I won't ramble for too long here. The best thing is to take a look for yourself!

Of course, feedback, bug reports, ideas, and artist suggestions are more than welcome.

Visit Data To Art

The end of Shiny?

Last week, I shared my thoughts about wrapper tools like Shiny and Streamlit. I explained their limitations and made the hypothesis that, with the rise of AI, they may no longer be useful.

If you're interested, this sparked many discussions by email and on LinkedIn. Thanks so much for interacting! I love it when the internet looks like this instead of useless AI slop, and I'll try to summarize the discussion for you soon.

I was also happy to see that many people shared my opinion: in the AI era, there is little reason not to use the "real" tools to create interactive dataviz. And that brings me to my last point.

It's the perfect time to learn D3.js

I'm an AI pessimist. But there's one great thing about it: d3.js is now accessible to everyone.

In case you missed it, d3.js is the best tool to build graphs. It's limitless, but traditionally hard to learn.

Today:

• React, another JavaScript library, makes it much simpler if you use it the right way
• AI can write most of the code for you, as long as you understand the concepts and know how to guide it

My take is that many people will switch to it in the very near future. And the ones who don't will miss out.

So I decided to create an online course on the topic.

If you have any questions, just drop me an email!

And be careful: once you start building visualizations with these tools, there's no going back.

I'm so excited about this!

Let's talk soon,
Yan