2016 was an exciting year for the Bocoup DataVis team – we wanted to start a new tradition of sharing some of our key highlights, and telling you more about the fun things to come this year. Here goes!

bocoup data vis 2015 recap

2016 In summary (in no particular order):

  • The very excellent Peter Beshai joined our team, bringing with him a host of expertise, experience, and improvements.
  • We helped Dr. Sorger’s lab at Harvard Medical School to design and develop the Breast Cancer Browser: an online tool for exploring and visualizing the results of a multitude of different experiments focused on how various breast cancer cell lines respond to a number of different perturbagens. We also learned what “perturbagens” meant.
  • We partnered with the amazing folks at Measurement Lab to find ways to visualize over 800,000,000 internet health speed test results. We built a whole lot of pipelines, an API server (so that no one has to build a lot of pipelines) and a pretty robust front end, all open source. Peter, our resident SVG lines expert, wrote about and released a host of plugins that make working with lines even more fun in D3.js. Expect to hear more about our work with Measurement Lab very soon, as we prepare to launch it and all of our code alongside it.
  • Much like the rest of the country, we were glued to our many screens during the election season. We were really thrilled to partner with the Coral project to come up with a way to help news outlets and other interested parties capture the sentiment around the election. We’ve been really excited to see our open source interactive used in some interesting contexts.
  • We worked with Jeff Heer and his fantastic team at UW’s Interactive Data Lab to help build the next version of Lyra, an interactive, open-source visualization environment.
  • Last but not least, we ran the 4th OpenVis Conf, bringing together some amazing speakers and penguins at the New England Aquarium. If you haven’t seen videos from last year, you can check them out in this incredible interactive explorer.

2017 promises to be no different. We’re looking forward to continue our work on incredible projects with amazing clients and contributing back to our community of visualizers on the web, with such projects as:

  • Our next OpenVis Conf is in the works and we selfishly can’t wait to see all our incredible speakers, please join us while you can.
  • Jim, our resident R master, explored the history of Kung Fu films in this incredible interactive analysis.
  • We’ve gotten clearer about what we do here on the team – not only do we build amazing data visualization tools and web applications, but we work with our clients’ data needs to find answers to those puzzling questions, and we design the right data-driven visualization interfaces to match. You can reach out to us to chat about your challenges any time.

Last but not least, we are growing! I hope that this post has given you an idea of the wonderful things to come. We’ll be hiring a few new engineering team members for our group, so get your application in here. We are also hiring a new Director be my partner in running DataVis at Bocoup as I step into a new role as Principal Engineer. Come join us!