Authors & Acknowledgements

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Authors	About Us
	Jack Dougherty is Professor of Educational Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He teaches a data visualization course where students partner with community organizations to help them tell their stories online with interactive charts and maps. Trained as a historian, Jack learned data visualization to share evidence more widely about cities, suburbs, and schools over time for his On The Line book. Visit his website or follow him on Mastodon.
	Ilya Ilyankou is a computer scientist and artist. He is currently pursuing a PhD in conversational systems (large language models) at University College London (UCL). Prior to joining UCL, Ilya spent five years in industry as a full-stack developer and data engineer. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Studio Arts from Trinity College, Hartford, and a master’s degree in Geospatial Information Science from the University of Leeds. Follow Ilya on Twitter or visit his website.

Jack Dougherty is Professor of Educational Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He teaches a data visualization course where students partner with community organizations to help them tell their stories online with interactive charts and maps. Trained as a historian, Jack learned data visualization to share evidence more widely about cities, suburbs, and schools over time for his On The Line book. Visit his website or follow him on Mastodon.

Ilya Ilyankou is a computer scientist and artist. He is currently pursuing a PhD in conversational systems (large language models) at University College London (UCL). Prior to joining UCL, Ilya spent five years in industry as a full-stack developer and data engineer. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Studio Arts from Trinity College, Hartford, and a master’s degree in Geospatial Information Science from the University of Leeds. Follow Ilya on Twitter or visit his website.

Acknowledgements

In 2016, we launched an earlier draft of this book under a different title, Data Visualization for All, as part of an introductory course for Trinity College students and their community partners in Hartford, Connecticut to tell their organization’s data stories through interactive charts and maps. Veronica X. Armendariz (Trinity Class of 2016) served as an outstanding teaching assistant and provided initial tutorials. The draft expanded in 2017 when we launched a free online Trinity edX course by the same name, with our wonderful co-instructors Stacy Lam (Trinity Class of 2019) and David Tatem (Instructional Technologist), who contributed rich ideas and countless hours. To date more than 23,000 students have started the edX course, though only a small fraction actually complete the six-week curriculum. Thanks also to the Trinity Information Technology staff and friends who produced edX course videos: Angie Wolf, Sean Donnelly, Ron Perkins, Samuel Oyebefun, Phil Duffy, and Christopher Brown. Funding for students who worked on the earlier draft was generously provided by the Office of Community Learning and Information Technology Services at Trinity College.

We thank the many individuals and organizations who helped us learn many of the skills that we teach in this book, especially Alvin Chang and Andrew Ba Tran, who were previously data journalists at The Connecticut Mirror; Michael Howser, Steve Batt, and their colleagues at the University of Connecticut Library, Map and Geographic Information Center (MAGIC); and Jean-Pierre Haeberly, Director of Web Development at Trinity College; Also, thank you to everyone who inspired Jack to be code-curious at The Humanities and Technology Camp (THATCamp) events, sponsored by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and encouraged him and his students to explore civic technology for the public good at the Transparency Camp sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation. We also appreciated opportunities to share our work-in-progress at data workshops hosted by Scott Gaul and Doug Shipman, formerly at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, and Michelle Riordan-Nold at the Connecticut Data Collaborative.

Guided by feedback from readers, educators, and our editors, we rewrote the entire draft in 2020 to reorganize the structure, deepen the concepts, and enhance the tutorials. We thank everyone at O’Reilly Media who worked with us to bring you this finished product, especially our outstanding developmental editor, Amelia Blevins, our meticulous copy editor, Stephanie English, our well-organized production editor, Katie Tozer, and other members of their team: Nick Adams, Jonathan Hassel, and Andy Kwan We also appreciate O’Reilly’s support for three technical reviewers who provided excellent commentary that helped us to improve the manuscript: Carl Allchin, Derek Eder, and Erica Hayes. Thanks also to readers who kindly shared feedback on the draft text or code templates: Jen Andrella, Gared Bard, Alberto Cairo, Fionnuala Darby-Hudgens, Lino Galiana, Nick Klagge, Dorraj Machai, Federico Marini, Oleksandr Oksymets, Elizabeth Rose, Lisa Charlotte Rost, Xavier Ruiz, Laura Tateosian, Elizabeth von Briesen, and Colleen Wheeler.