Upgrade coming soon!

Hi everyone, 

I'm in the process of upgrading this blog and working on new content. Most of my content has been very technical, but I've started to work on more conceptual posts such as Data Science career advice. 

To get your feedback, please let me know on Twitter (@AlexKatona1) if there are any topics that you are interested in reading about or that would be most helpful for you. 

Introducing the "Change plot"

A common issue I've seen is how to visually represent percentage change and current values for a high number of categories at the same time. To solve for this, I created a new chart type called the "Change plot." 

Read and click through the Tableau story below to learn more about it. Click on the far right of the Tableau toolbar to view in full screen. Another new chart type I invented is the Polyarea chart, which you can read about here.

The Future of Government

The 2019 World Government Summit has partnered with Information is Beautiful to create the World Data Visualization Prize. The competition involves creating data visualizations based on one of three provided concepts and datasets.

I submitted a data visualization that explores "The Future of Government." Click here to access the interactive version: http://bl.ocks.org/akatona1/raw/1daa312799d7a438d2a45420e5fe01a8/

See the video below that demonstrates how to interact with the visualization. For more D3.js work, check out my Polyarea chart that was featured by Kantar at the Information is Beautiful Awards.

The code used to create this visualization is available on GitHub: https://github.com/akatona1/WDVP_The_Future_of_Govt

Top 101 data visualizations worldwide for 2018 Kantar IIB Awards

In an effort to innovate within the field of data visualization, I created a new chart type called the Polyarea chart. I entered this work to the 2018 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards.

On 12/4/18, I attended the awards ceremony in New York City. Even though I didn't win, I'm honored that my work made the top 101 visualizations worldwide for 2018 and was displayed next to work by FiveThirtyEight, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Guardian, National Geographic, The Economist, Harvard, and many others.

See a video of my work being introduced and photos from the event below. If you'd like to build the chart yourself, I've created posts for D3.js and Tableau. 

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Attending the awards ceremony for the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards in New York City #iibawards #nyc #newyorkcity #d3js #datascience #datavisualization #dataviz #visualization

A post shared by Alex Katona (@alexkatona1) on Dec 13, 2018 at 8:56pm PST

Forbes Under 30 US Summit

In September 2018, I attended the Forbes Under 30 US Summit in Boston. There were many interesting events and great speakers. Check out some of the photos from the summit below. Follow me on Instagram (alexkatona1) for more photos. Also, check out my post about the Forbes Under 30 Europe Summit in Amsterdam. 

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The crew #under30summit #Forbes #Boston @valesabate @marcelaokr @sanjnamehta2018

A post shared by Alex Katona (@alexkatona1) on Oct 22, 2018 at 11:42pm PDT

Forbes Under 30 Europe Summit

I’m currently a nominee for the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 in the Enterprise Technology category. Last week, I attended the European summit in Amsterdam. It was a great experience and I met a lot of interesting people.

I got to see the closing bell at Euronext Amsterdam, went on a canal cruise, heard about Maisie Williams’ (aka Arya Stark’s) startup, and much more. I'm looking forward to attending the US summit in Boston at the end of September. Check out some of the photos from the summit below. Follow me on Instagram (alexkatona1) for more photos.   

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#Amsterdam #under30summit #Forbes #tshlife

A post shared by Alex Katona (@alexkatona1) on Sep 27, 2018 at 11:22pm PDT

Polyarea chart using D3.js

(Click the gif above to view more easily). For the code used to create this visualization, here is the link to the GitHub repo: 

https://github.com/akatona1/Polyarea-chart

To interact with the visualization on your laptop, you can download the files from the GitHub repo. Then, place the files in a directory, start a local server (e.g. using the command "python -m http.server" from an Anaconda prompt), go to http://localhost:8000/ from Chrome, and click on the "Polyarea_html_Alex_Katona.html" file.

I submitted this work to the 2018 Kantar Information is Beautiful awards and it is now displayed on their site: https://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/showcase/2996-polyarea-chart. Polyarea charts can also be created in Tableau. 

Best of Marketing Dashboards by Tableau

Tableau compiled the best presentations of marketing dashboards from their customers and the dashboards that Tony Valeriano and I created for our Tableau Conference 2017 presentation made the list! 

This was announced in Tableau’s newsletter that was sent on 8/14/18. Our presentation is the first one listed under the Analyst section. You can watch the presentation on Tableau's website or embedded below. There are photos from the presentation on this post. 

Popping Parameters for Tableau 10.4 and above

My Next Level Popping Parameter blog posts have been very popular. However, Tableau has made changes to the software which broke the method that was used to create the functionality for the Part 1 post. For Tableau versions 10.4 and above, it requires a new method of creating popping parameters that is described below. For this post, I'm using Tableau Public 2018.2.

Tableau Conference sessions now available on YouTube

The Tableau Conference sessions where my work was presented are now available on YouTube. There are photos from the 2017 presentation on this post. 

2017 session where I presented titled “Macy’s: Cracking the code of A/B testing and market basket analysis”:




2015 session that my manager presented titled “Making Data Visualization Actionable at Macy's”: