Christian Swinehart

Thesis work centered on data visualization, information graphics, and typography. Received the school’s Award of Excellence in my final year and an intramural research grant in 2006.

Studied under Laurence F. Abbott with research published in the journals Network, Neural Computation, and Neurocomputing and presented at multiple Society for Neuroscience and Cosyne conferences.

Graduated with a self-developed major—its curriculum combining psychology, neurobiology, computer science, and philosophy coursework with a final independent project.

Currently teaching Introduction to Data Visualization in the Computer Science department.

Designed and taught electives on Information Visualization, Front-end Web Development, and Creative Coding in the Graphic Design department.

Taught Data Visualization & Information Graphics to grads and Data Integrity as a senior elective in the Communications Design department.

Taught for four years as part of the m.s. in Data Visualization program. I revamped the Data Visualization & Information Aesthetics course, supervised masters thesis projects in Major Studio II, and covered the nuts and bolts of data science in Data Sructures.

Created and taught an elective in the Graphic Design department called Lies, Damned Lies, and Data Visualization for three years and co-taught a semester of Graduate Studio I.

Columbia University (2018, 2019, 2021)
Parsons m.s. in Data Visualization (2017)
School of Visual Arts (2014, 2015)

A design studio specializing in data visualization, user interaction, and full-stack development. Clients include: System, Our World in Data, Boxcar Press, Yale School of Management, The New York Times, Citibank, Allied Works, Ennead, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Mitch Epstein.

Designed and developed interactive data visualization products covering politics, society, the environment, and the global economy.

User experience and development on Lisa Strausfeld’s National Design Award winning team. Clients included Gallup, Lincoln Center, olpc, Litl, and the Museum of Arts and Design.

In collaboration with OWID's researchers, I designed bespoke visualizations for articles across the site and led the group designing and developing Grapher—the chart-rendering engine that powers the site’s interactive visualizations. I oversaw a redesign of Grapher’s user experience and built a revamped details-on-demand system of my own design for exploring the data within a chart.

System is a data-discovery platform allowing individuals and organizations to see the emergent structures that lie within the information they’ve amassed. I developed the site and designed it in collaboration with their product design team.

Yale’s Program on Financial Stability was created in the aftermath of 2008 and engages in research that leaves us better prepared to respond to (or ideally prevent) future economic meltdowns. This project aims to exhaustively catalog the history of financial crises and evaluate the effectiveness of the various attempts at ameliorating them.

Developed a portfolio site showcasing the work of this New York & Portland-based architecture firm. Designed in collaboration with Lisa Strausfeld and Takaaki Okada.

Designed figures for an ieee publication written by my longtime scientific collaborator, Dr. Kristofer Bouchard.

Developed visualizations as part of a redesign of the account interface shown to checking and credit card customers on the web and mobile apps. My diagrams were used to show trends across transaction histories and helped monitor balances, expenses, and savings goals.

The Billionaires Index visualized the wealth of the world’s 500 richest people—information previously only available through the Bloomberg Terminal. It was designed by the Visual Data team where I contributed the front-end development, interaction design, and data api.

An early instance of 3d interaction design on the web, this portfolio site presented the work of the artists and architects at this groundbreaking firm within a VR-like, spatially organized environment.

My current research uses visualization methods to make sense of chronological nonlinearities within literary narratives. The primary dataset is the text and structure of David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest. Its length, enormous number of characters, and flashback-heavy plotting make it an ideal subject for investigation.

A javascript library for Node.js that enables the creation of bitmap and vector files outside of the browser. It provides a drawing model identical to the HTML Canvas element via an emulation I wrote in Rust for speed and memory-safety.

A visual analysis of the Choose Your Own Adventure books of my youth. The project examines the structure of choices in the books and how it changed over the course of the series. Animations allow you to see patterns among the many unique paths through each of the books.

PlotDevice is a Macintosh application used for computational graphic design. It provides an interactive Python environment where you can create two-dimensional graphics and output them in a variety of vector, bitmap, and animation formats. It is meant both as a sketch environment for exploring generative design and as a general purpose graphics library for use in external Python programs.

In a number of projects I’ve made use of force-directed layout routines for constructing network diagrams. Arbor is a javascript library that abstracts away the physics simulation and provides hooks for rendering the resulting graphs in the developer’s choice of canvas, SVG, or HTML.

After scraping data from the Bedbug Registry and New York’s 311 system, I created an interactive map to view incidents and animate the sequence over time. Clicking the play button begins the march from 2007’s relatively quiet scene to the explosion of reports in 2010 & ’11.

In collaboration with Michael Brainard’s lab at U.C.S.F. I visualized statistical patterns in Zebra Finch vocalization data as a way to unravel the ‘grammar’ of birdsong and the neural circuitry underlying it.

advisor: Matthew Monk
program head: Bethany Johns

Network: Computation in Neural Systems 17(3): 235–252

advisor: Laurence F. Abbott
program head: Eve Marder

Neural Computation 17: 609–631

Neurocomputing 58–60: 327–335

Orlando, New Orleans, & San Diego

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island

Alicante, Spain

Python, JavaScript, Rust, C, Objective-C, Bash, Fish, Make, Perl, C++, Java, Scheme

Canvas, SVG, D3, P5, PlotDevice, Zdog, Processing, Three.js

NumPy, Pandas, Seaborn, SQL, MATLAB, Matplotlib, BeautifulSoup, NLTK

React, jQuery, Handlebars, Lodash, Chroma.js, Less, Mapbox

Nginx, Apache, Caddy, Docker, Express, Prisma, CouchDB, Postgres, Redis, Tornado, Eleventy, GitHub Actions

Illustrator, InDesign, Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, Excel, Max/MSP, git