I remember a Dilbert comic strip long before the year 2000. Dilbert you know this young male office worker with his rounded glasses, short hair, white shirt and curly red tie. Most of the time he has no mouth and he lives in a cubicle.
His pointy-haired boss comes to him saying : "I think we should build an sql database". Dilbert, after a few seconds : "What color do you want that database ?". The boss: "I heard that mauve or purple have the most RAM".
See in the nineties comics were already a terrific way to educate managers about the best colors for database.
More recently xkcd (I hope you all know the pure genius of these childish stick figures). I remember xkcd teaching dataviz with a "self-referencing pie chart" with two colors black and white. The black part being labelled "fraction of this pie which is black" , the white part being labelled "fraction of this pie being white". I let you a few seconds to think about it.
Few years ago, Datacomics went far beyond those pioneers and formulated a revolutionary hypothesis : Comics are a very powerful tool to tell stories with data and hopefully teach things to people.
We have tonight the great honor and pleasure to host Benjamin Bach and Zehzong Wang from the University of Edinburgh. They co-published several research papers about Data Comics. In their research they design and investigate interactive information visualization interfaces to help people explore, communicate, and understand data.
The presentations tonight will be done in hopefully scottish english, which is as everybody knows much easier to follow for our french audience especially if talked very very slowly.
Questions can be formulated in either english or french in the chat.
Let's welcome Benjamin.