We just announced next year’s Tapestry Conference – the fifth episode (chapter? act?)! It will take place on March 1st, 2017, in St. Augustine, FL. We have three exciting keynotes, and we’re looking for your talk proposals, posters, and demos!

Tapestry is a conference about storytelling with data. The goal is to bring together people from different backgrounds and have them talk to each other: journalists, designers, folks working for NGOs or government, academics, etc.

If you want to see who spoke at the last few conferences, check out the YouTube channel and watch the videos! We’ve had people like Alberto Cairo, Hannah Fairfield, Kim Rees, Nick Sousanis, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas (aka Marnanda), Giorgia Lupi, and many other amazing speakers in the past. I also wrote a little article about the conference last year.

Keynotes

For next year, we have these three amazing people to give the keynotes:

How To Attend

Since the conference is small on purpose, we’re hand-picking attendees. That means that you can’t just register. Instead, you’ll have to request an invite using the friendly button on the website. Please give us a few sentences of why you should attend the conference. We’re doing this to create a good mix of people and keep one particular group from taking over. This is also to keep the conference focused on its core topic of storytelling with data, and not just make it yet another visualization conference.

When you request an invite, it pays to spend a few moments to reflect on what you’re trying to get out of the conference, or what makes you a good person to have in the mix. The more specific you can be, the easier it is for us to accept your request – if we can’t figure out who you are or why you want to attend, we’re not going to hit that magic little accept button.

Ask Not What Tapestry Can Do For You…

We’ll also have six short stories, as well as posters and demos. And that’s where you come in: we want your proposals! Go to the website and send us your talk proposals! The deadline for that is December 1, but there’s no penalty for submitting them early. In fact, that might actually help get yours accepted.

We’ll also have a formal posters program next year. This is not just because we want to have more academic content, but also because we want to make it easier for students to travel. In many places, you need to have something accepted in order to get travel support. So we’ll have a proper review process this time for the posters! We don’t exactly have a way to submit them yet, but it’s coming soon. The deadline for posters will be December 15.

Finally, we’re again looking for demos. Those are hugely popular and a real high point of the program. We’ve usually selected those very late, but this time we’re going to adhere to a stricter deadline. So get your demo proposals to us by January 15!

Time and Place

As in previous years, we’re attaching Tapestry to NICAR to make travel arrangements easier for journalists. Tapestry takes place the day before NICAR, and we provide transportation to Jacksonville (where NICAR will take place) after the end of the conference.

We picked a beautiful little hotel in St. Augustine for the conference this time. St. Augustine is a beautiful town with a lot of history. Wikipedia boasts that it’s the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement within the borders of the contiguous United States. And it’s just a cute town with lots going on.

There’s more information on the Tapestry website and you should also follow the Tapestry Twitter account for more information.

Teaser image by Steven Martin