Strata NYC 2012 and PyData

A week ago, I gave a talk at Strata NYC on network visualization ("Beyond the Hairball"). The talk had many technical issues (I'm new to using a MBP and Keynote to present), but the slides seem to have had some kind of life on Twitter. So here's the rather large and slightly academic deck:

Visualizing Networks: Beyond the Hairball from OReillyStrata

I was gratified to get so many RT's, email, and favorites from people including Gilad Lotan, Steven Strogatz, and Ben Shneiderman.

Strata itself baffled me a little due to size and "big data" hype factor -- I got a little tired of overhearing businessmen on their phones talking about "monetizing social." (Why did "social" have to become a despicable noun?) My favorite moments were certainly social more than technical: getting to meet Noah Iliinsky and Kim Rees, seeing Danyel Fisher from MSR and his game analyst partner Kim Stedman, Wes McKinney (with his new book, Python for Data Analysis), and Jon Peltier and Naomi Robbins. These folks made for a very nice data vis and python slice of the big data conference.

Then There Was PyData!

I love it when a technical conference isn't afraid to show code, and make code available. That was PyData! Here were some highlights for me (with two tracks, I missed half of it!):

• Timeseries in Pandas, from Chang She
  
• NLTK, or "Just Enough NLP with Python" from Andrew Montalenti (See also his "Webcrawling and Metadata" slides)
  
• Statsmodels and Patsy from Skipper Seabold (his 538 model in python is here)
  
• The always wonderful scikit-learn tutorials from Jake VanderPlas (here's a homepage for some of it) and Stefan van der Walt's mind-blowing scikit-image stuff
  
• Brian Granger's really excellent overview of updates in the IPython notebook (here's a general tour of the notebook in the online notebook viewer; and here's their example notebooks folder on github)
  

I was sad not to see any updates on D3.py or bokeh, the ggplot2-style library for Python that Continuum Analytics and Peter Wang are working on; Peter did tell me that he's going back to it now that he's got a grant to work on it, and it will be using canvas, rather than D3.js/SVG to draw to the browser. (This was a performance and complexity decision. I fear it will reduce a lot of interactive vis design opportunities for folks like me, but I'll suspend judgment till I play with it.)

All in all, Pydata was a good couple of days, well worth the trip! They could stand to get a few women to speak at the next event, though. (No, I'm not volunteering!)