This Blog

This blog is designed to explore the intersection of information, design, and programming with the goal of developing my skills in each of these areas and finding out how to use them in my career. This combination of technical and creative expertise is perhaps best captured by the evolving concept of the data scientist or information designer — roles which require experience in the following areas:

1. Computer Science – acquire and parse data
2. Mathematics, Statistics, & Data Mining – filter and mine
3. Graphic Design – represent and refine
4. Infovis and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) – interaction

Visualizing these skills in a graph shows how different jobs (identified using standard SOC or ONET codes) place different emphasis on these abilities. The three jobs below each have strengths that need to be cultivated in order meet the needs of information design.

My Background

Your basic Midwesterner … born in Michigan, raised in Wisconsin, currently living in Milwaukee. My hometown of Appleton, WI is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the dark red area of the map below. (Map courtesy of the NYT’s dialect quiz.)