Across a collection of 4 Observable notebooks, Olivia has explored how to draw and animate 'waterlines'—an old technique for showing water in maps—in JavaScript. This talk will present the project, spanning design, history, coding, and maths. Olivia will share lessons and reflections around the power of images, connecting to historical examples and writing in notebooks.
2022
Visualising cultural heritage collections: Is the data enough?
I gave this talk for the information+visualization talk series, at Fachhochschule Potsdam.
Data visualisation can open up digitised museum, library and archive collections to new possibilities. Walking through a series of projects, I explore the questions: Does visualising cultural data reveal the patterns/stories we're interested in? Do our designs speak for themselves? Can we trust what we see?
2020
Maps in Time: Visualising the historical Ordnance Survey | Information+ Conference 2021
A division is often made between maps and timelines. This presentation from the Living with Machines project explores combining the two, visualising a dataset of 130,000 maps from the early Ordnance Survey (OS), Britain’s national mapping agency. It was the OS who, from the early 19th century, created the first comprehensive, detailed and accurate picture of Great Britain. We show how animated data graphics can bring the story of the maps to life for a popular audience. We also visualise the data by space and time to support analysis in research.
2021
Drawing Waterlines on Maps with Olivia Vane
In this live code walkthrough & discussion with members of the Observable team & community, I share lessons & techniques learned through creating a beautiful collection of notebooks about drawing and animating 'waterlines'—an old technique for showing water in maps—in JavaScript. https://observablehq.com/collection/@oliviafvane/watermarks
2021
Designers - what are they good for (in data visualisation)? | Information+ Conference 2018
We take a close look at what making sketches and prototypes actually *does* to progress design work in data viz, taking examples from Digital Humanities.