Can I See Your CV? A bioinformatician's resume, visualized as a textual scatterplot
Hilary Spencer
Monday, 17 November 2008 20:22 UTC
Pawel Szczesny just posted a visual representation of his CV on Flickr:
He explains:
Above dotted line: things I did so far, below are my plans. Red: feel competent; green: still learning. Intensity and font size: relative importance and time spent on.
The y-axis represents time and the x-axis is roughly “skillset” (ranging from artistic endeavors to scientific ones).
The image would probably be a bit more intuitive if time was represented on the x-axis. It’s interesting to see photography included on the CV, even if it is a hobby. I was reminded of an interview I had a couple of years ago at a big database firm for a UI design position where the interviewer explicitly asked me to bring an example of my photography and asked me how it informed my design work.
Via Friendfeed
Update (11/19): Pawel says photography is not a hobby for him: “Visualization/Photography is there to indicate that I consider data visualization one of the most important elements of scientific method. What I’m trying to figure out is what kind of presentation can help us in understanding really complex systems, such as human (genetic, to make it easier) diseases.” Sorry Pawel!
Updated 19 November 2008 18:55 UTC
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Replies
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Thanks Hilary, here is the updated version. Hopefully it’s a little bit more clear than my first attempt.
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Hi Pawel,
I updated the post above – I actually thought it was great that you included photography, regardless of if it was a hobby or not. At some point I hope to write a longer post regarding why I think learning photography (and by this I don’t mean just the technical aspects of photography) is valuable for data / information visualization. One question for you: why specifically night photography?
Updated CV:
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Thanks. There’s no need to be sorry, I’ve learnt a bit how to communicate my ideas :). Photography sounds very good as a hobby, however not all the people consider it as a good addition to professional CV – that’s why I thought it would be better to rename it.
I became interested in night photography because it can incorporate time into an image – stars trails, cars’ lights, leaf movements etc. So basically it was about showing a process in a single frame. Including time in the image during the day is also possible – if you block enough light – however it requires ND filters (5 stops and more) that are too expensive :). I’ve been also experimenting with other techniques like HDTR but I don’t have anything good enough to show yet.
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