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What is Data Stories?

Data Stories is a long-running podcast about data visualization, hosted by Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner. Each episode is a conversation with a researcher, designer, journalist or artist working with data — covering topics like color, climate visuals, sound, sketching, dashboards and the boundaries of the field. It is less a tutorial show and more a way to hear practitioners explain how they think.

What you get

• Interviews and discussions rather than step-by-step instruction.
• A broad range of guests, from academic visualization researchers to data journalists and artists.
• An archive of episodes, plus a searchable archive page and full transcriptions of the 170 episodes, released as a dataset with code on GitHub.

Who it suits

• Designers and analysts who want context and vocabulary for visualization decisions.
• Researchers and students who want an accessible entry point to academic work.
• Anyone choosing tools or chart forms who wants to understand trade-offs before committing.

A practical way in

Start with a topic you already work on. If you make charts for the public, the climate visuals episode with Ed Hawkins is a concrete case study in making one graphic travel. If you care about chart choice, the color episode with Karen Schloss digs into why some palettes fail. The transcriptions make it easy to skim an episode before listening, or to search for a term like "maps" across the whole archive.

Trade-off to expect

Episodes are conversational and often run long, so they reward listening rather than quick lookup. If you need a specific technique explained in order, a written guide will serve you better; use Data Stories for the reasoning behind the technique.

How can I listen to or subscribe to Data Stories?

You can listen to or subscribe to Data Stories through the show's own site, Data Stories, which lists the latest episodes, a full episode archive, and news updates. The site presents episodes by number and title—for example, 170 | Formalizing Design with Gabrielle Mérite and Alan Wilson—and offers a searchable archive. It also mentions a transcriptions dataset covering 170 episodes, useful if you prefer reading or searching spoken content rather than listening.

Subscribing usually means adding the podcast's feed to a podcast app so new episodes arrive automatically. On the site, look for a "subscribe" option or feed link; the page evidence shows subscribe-related keywords but no specific platform links or prices. Once you have the feed URL, you can paste it into most podcast players.

Practical next step

Open Data Stories, find the subscribe or feed link, and add it to your usual podcast app. If you want to sample before subscribing, start with a classic episode listed on the page, such as 149 | xkcd or the art of data storytelling with web cartoons, or 119 | Color with Karen Schloss.

How to choose a listening method

• Podcast app: Best for automatic downloads, playback speed control, and listening offline.
• Website archive: Best for browsing by episode number, reading show notes, or searching transcripts.
• Transcripts: Best when you need to quote, skim, or search across many episodes rather than listen in full.

If you are new to the show, subscribe first and then use the archive to pick episodes by topic; if you are researching a specific subject, the transcript search is likely the faster route.

What topics and guests are covered in Data Stories episodes?

Data Stories is an interview podcast about data visualization, hosted by Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner. Episodes pair one or two guests with a specific theme, usually a research area, a design practice, or a debate within the field. The archive spans 170 episodes, and the show's own news item notes that the full set of transcripts runs to roughly 1.5 million spoken words, with recurring mentions of maps (923) and AI (48). The guest list leans toward academics, visualization researchers, designers, and occasionally journalists or artists.

H3 Recurring topic areas

• Design process and craft — e.g. formalizing design decisions with Gabrielle Mérite and Alan Wilson; sketching and visual thinking with Eva-Lotta Lamm.
• Research frontiers in visualization — e.g. the boundaries of infovis with Sheelagh Carpendale; what makes a visualization memorable with Michelle Borkin.
• Perception and encoding — e.g. color with Karen Schloss.
• Data storytelling and communication — e.g. xkcd's web cartoons; iconic climate visuals with Ed Hawkins; turning data into sound with Hannah Davis.
• Critical and cultural perspectives — e.g. feminist data visualization with Catherine D'Ignazio; data sculptures with Adrien Segal.
• Professional practice and tools — e.g. data conversations with Vidya Setlur; the "dashboard conspiracy" with Lyn Bartram and Alper Sarikaya.
• Conference coverage — e.g. highlights from IEEE VIS'22 with Tamara Munzner.

H3 How to decide whether it fits your listening

A useful next step: browse the show's archive page, which now supports searching the transcribed episodes, so you can look up a guest name or a term like "color" or "maps" and jump straight to the relevant conversation rather than scrolling the full list. The podcast is Data Stories; hosts and guests also appear in the broader visualization community, and related discussions often surface through IEEE VIS.

How can I search or browse the Data Stories episode archive?

Use the site's own archive page, or search the full transcripts if you want to find a topic mentioned inside an episode.

The homepage links a full episode archive, and the December 2024 news item points to a brand new archive page built for browsing and searching. The same news item notes that the 170 episodes were transcribed into roughly 1.54 million spoken words, so keyword search is not limited to episode titles or show notes.

Practical routes

• Browse by episode number or title on the archive page when you already know roughly what you want — for example the classics list includes episodes such as 149 with xkcd, 147 on iconic climate visuals, and 138 on turning data into sound.
• Search the transcripts when you remember a phrase, guest or theme but not the episode. This is the more useful route for questions like “which episode discussed color?” or “where did they talk about maps?”
• Start from the classics list if you are new. It is a curated entry point rather than the complete back catalogue.
• Use the linked data and code if you want to analyse the archive yourself, for example to count topic mentions or build your own index.

A concrete scenario

Suppose you are preparing a talk on colour in visualization. Browsing the archive by title gets you to episode 119 with Karen Schloss. If you instead want every passing remark about colour across a decade of interviews, transcript search is the better tool, because the mention may sit in the middle of a conversation rather than in the title.

Decision criterion

Choose browsing when your target is a person, a known episode or a broad theme. Choose transcript search when your target is a specific term, and expect some noise: the news item itself notes the corpus contains 61 mentions of weather, 923 of maps and 48 of AI, which shows how literal keyword counts can be.

For the podcast itself, see Data Stories. If you want a second, independent way to find visualization interviews and talks, VISPubs indexes visualization publications and talks, though it is a different kind of resource rather than a mirror of this archive.

Who are the hosts of Data Stories and what are their backgrounds?

Data Stories is hosted by Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner. The show is described as a podcast on data visualization, and the two hosts are the consistent voices behind its interviews and discussions.

Their backgrounds are best understood through the roles they occupy in the data visualization field rather than through detailed biographies on the podcast page itself:

• Enrico Bertini is an academic data visualization researcher. His work sits on the research and teaching side of the field, which shapes the show's interest in visualization methods, evaluation and the research community.
• Moritz Stefaner is a data visualization designer and consultant. His perspective comes from applied design practice, which balances the academic angle with questions of craft, communication and real-world projects.

That pairing is the podcast's main structural advantage. A researcher and a practitioner interviewing guests together tends to produce conversations that move between theory and practice, rather than staying in one lane. Guests on the show reflect that range: episodes include formal design discussions, data conversations, research highlights from IEEE VIS, climate visuals, color, data sculpture and feminist data visualization.

If you want to judge whether the show matches your interests, start with an episode whose guest works in your own area. For example, if you care about research methods, the IEEE VIS highlights episode is a natural entry point; if you care about design practice, the formalizing design episode is a better fit. The archive also includes full transcriptions, so you can search for topics or names before committing to a full listen.

The show is available at Data Stories.

What is the Data Stories transcriptions dataset and how can I access it?

The Data Stories transcriptions dataset is the full written text of the podcast's 170 episodes, produced in partnership with Miska Knapek. According to the show's own news item, it contains 1,539,957 spoken words and is searchable through a new archive page, with the underlying data and code published on GitHub for people who want to analyze it themselves.

What it covers

• Complete transcripts for episodes 1–170, not just selected highlights.
• An archive page that lets you browse and search episodes by text.
• A "little tour of the data" — a curated look at patterns in the corpus, such as the counts the show highlights: 61 mentions of weather, 923 of maps and 48 of AI.
• Data and code for anyone who wants to run their own analysis, such as topic modeling, term-frequency comparisons or tracking how visualization vocabulary shifted over a decade.

How to access it

Start at Data Stories and look for the transcriptions news item or the archive page linked from it. From there you can either search transcripts in the browser or follow the GitHub link for the raw data and scripts.

Who it's for

• Researchers and students who need a text corpus of practitioner-oriented visualization discussion.
• Podcast listeners who want to quote or check a claim without re-listening.
• Anyone building search or summarization tools over domain-specific spoken content.

One practical note: transcripts of conversational speech are useful for finding topics and phrases, but they are not cleaned-up prose. If you plan to quote someone precisely, verify against the audio, and expect the word counts to include filler, false starts and host banter.