Conference Report: Tapestry 2013

About 100 attendees, three keynotes, five short talks, demos, discussions, food, music, and a fantastic atmosphere: the Tapestry conference for storytelling with data took place on February 27 in Nashville, TN. Here is a conference report with links to talk videos, as well as some first news on Tapestry 2014.

Conference hotels tend to all look the same: nondescript, badly lit, depressing ballrooms, terrible acoustics, and just way too many rooms with names that all sound the same.

Not the Union Station Hotel Nashville, though. It’s a former train station has been turned into a hotel, and it’s simply beautiful. It has been renovated very well, with lots of nice little touches, like a time table from the 1930s, etc.

The event was organized by Tableau Software and Investigative Reports & Editors (IRE), emceed by Ellie Ms. Tableau Public Fields, and lasted one day. We picked the place and time to be close to the NICAR conference in Louisville, KY, but in a somewhat more intimate and interesting setting.

In order to foster discussions, not just talks, we had generous breaks, a long lunch, a demo session, and a reception the night before the conference. The talks consisted of three hour-long sessions for the keynotes and five short stories.

I’ve been a fan of Jonathan Corum’s work at The New York Times for a while, in particular since he won the Best of Show award at Malofiej last year for his Guantanamo Bay graphic. [...]