I Need a Data Consultant

I'm going to be teaching an intensive 2-day D3.js bootcamp in late October or early November. The curriculum isn't entirely set, yet, but will include deep dives into hierarchical, network, geographic and custom data visualization. It's not going to provide an introduction to D3, and is geared toward a developer with some experience with D3.

But this isn't an ad for that bootcamp. That's coming up. Instead, this is a plea for a data consultant. The more I give talks and workshops, the more I realize that one of the key requirements of a successful data visualization demonstration is an interesting and multi-faceted dataset. Too often, the dataset I use for demos and workshops is something I pick haphazardly or just randomly generate. But human beings like stories, and it's easier to understand principles of data visualization if the data you're visualizing is interesting and not abstract.

Add to that the need for a dataset amenable to the variety of techniques being demonstrated at a workshop like my D3 bootcamp, which will involve transformation from geographic to network to text to hierarchical data, and you're talking about a really challenging problem. Not only does the data need to be interesting and amenable to a variety of data visualization scenarios, it needs to be portable enough that it can be deployed easily on the web with D3.

I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to see if there is such a thing as a data consultant, or at least someone who thinks, along with her core talents in another domain, that she can identify useful and interesting data needed not only for situations like these, but also for providing contextual datasets in more practical scenarios.

If you're that data consultant, please feel free to contact me and tell me your rates and your requirements. Along with more traditional remuneration, I will also provide attribution in the materials both at the workshop and in any online pieces that also use the data.

UPDATE: The official description is up on Data-viz-jobs.