tcplot

Upcoming: A Year in Your Own Data — A Build-a-thon

You've been collecting data all year. Let's make something out of it.

Join tcplot for a build-a-thon where the dataset is you. Bring a year of your own data — steps, sleep, songs, spending, miles, messages, books, photos — and spend the session turning it into a visualization worth keeping. Code it, draw it, or build it by hand.

The best personal-data projects aren't about the numbers; they're about the story only you can tell. A year is long enough to hold a season, a habit, a heartbreak, a move. We'll help you find the one thread worth pulling.

What you'll do

• ▸ Bring — or pull on the spot — a year of your own personal data
• ▸ Pick the one question you actually want it to answer
• ▸ Build a visualization — interactive, static, or physical — solo or in a small group
• ▸ Share what you made and what it told you

Where to find a year of your data

Most of it is already sitting in an app, waiting for an export — health apps (Apple Health, Google Fit, Fitbit), your Spotify streaming history, Google Takeout, a year of bank transactions, Strava or Garmin, Letterboxd or Goodreads, or your phone's screen-time report. Some exports take a day or two to arrive, so request yours before the event. Your data stays yours — bring only what you're comfortable working with.

What to bring

Your laptop and charger, a year of your data (or be ready to download it), and whatever tools you love — D3, Tableau, ggplot2, Observable, a spreadsheet, or just paper and beads. No tools at all is fine too.

Who this is for

Anyone curious about their own life in data — seasoned coders and total beginners alike. Come build something only you could make.

Hope to see you there!

Upcoming: Data Collection & Visualization in the Park

The best dataset is the one you gather yourself.

Join tcplot for a morning that starts with coffee and ends with a chart. We'll meet at The Coffee Shop NE, walk over to Audubon Park to collect data by hand, then come back and turn what we gathered into a visualization.

Data collection is usually invisible — by the time most of us see a dataset, someone else has already decided what counts. This is a chance to make those decisions yourself: what to measure, how to tally it, and what gets left out. The constraints of a clipboard and forty minutes turn out to be the whole lesson.

How the morning will flow

• ▸ Coffee & plan. Meet at The Coffee Shop NE for quick intros and to decide what each of us will count.
• ▸ Collect. Walk to Audubon Park and spend about forty minutes gathering data — tallies, timings, sketches, observations.
• ▸ Visualize. Head back and turn your raw tallies into something readable — on paper, in code, or in beads and thread.
• ▸ Share. Compare what we made — and how differently we each saw the same park.

Things you could count

• ▸ Birds, squirrels, and dogs — by count, by type, by minute
• ▸ How people pass through: walking, running, biking, rolling, with strollers
• ▸ Trees by species, or the colors of the leaves
• ▸ Dandelions in the grass — where they cluster and where they don't

What to bring

Something to record with — a notebook or your phone — and shoes for a short walk. A laptop is welcome for the visualizing part but not required; we'll have paper and making supplies on hand. Dress for the weather.

Rain plan: light rain, we'll go anyway. Heavy rain, we'll collect our data right from The Coffee Shop NE.

Who this is for

Anyone curious about where data comes from — practitioners and first-timers alike. No tools or experience required, just a willingness to notice things.

Hope to see you there!

Past Event: Data Physicalization Workshop — June 27th

What if your next chart wasn't on a screen?

Join tcplot for a hands-on morning of data physicalization — translating real datasets into objects you can hold, turn over, and put on your desk. We'll explore paper, thread, beads, and the surprisingly hard question of what to encode when you can't reach for a library.

We'll draw inspiration from projects like Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec's Dear Data, Nathalie Miebach's weather sculptures, and the broader tradition of data physicalization (dataphys.org). The constraint is the point: when you can't pipe data into ggplot, you have to make real decisions about hierarchy, encoding, and what's actually worth showing.

What you'll do

• ▸ Pick from a handful of small, pre-prepared datasets (Twin Cities weather, MN bird sightings, library checkouts, a week of your own personal data, or any other data)
• ▸ Work solo or in pairs to translate it into a physical artifact
• ▸ Share what you made and what surprised you
• ▸ Leave with the object you built

What we'll provide

Cardstock, embroidery thread, beads, tape, markers, making supplies, datasets printed and ready to go.

What to bring

Yourself. Optionally, a week of personal data you've been tracking (sleep, coffee, steps, moods, anything) or your own craft supplies of choice.

Who this is for

Anyone curious about data visualization — practitioners working in D3, Tableau, ggplot2, Observable, or none of the above. No craft skills required.

Hope to see you there!

Past Event: Claude Code for Data Visualization — May 23rd

AI-assisted coding is changing how visualization practitioners prototype, iterate, and ship. In this hands-on workshop, we'll get you up and running with Claude Code — Anthropic's agentic coding tool — and put it to work on real dataviz problems. No prior experience with AI coding tools required.

Whether you're deep in D3, grinding through ggplot2, or somewhere in between, you'll leave with a working setup and a concrete sense of where Claude Code fits (and doesn't fit) in a practitioner's workflow.

Location & Logistics

• ▸ When: Saturday, May 23 · 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM CDT
• ▸ Where: The Coffee Shop NE, 2852 Johnson St NE, Minneapolis, MN
• ▸ Make sure to bring your laptop and charger.

Past Event: An API Build-a-thon on April 4th

Are you ready to build a digital masterpiece? Whether you want to curate a virtual gallery using The Met, track near-earth objects with NASA, or dive into the digital archives of the Natural History Museum, this is your playground.

There's no set prompt—only a treasure trove of world-class APIs and a room full of creative minds. You pick the data, you pick the stack, and create your own adventure.

The Mission

You have one day to build a project using at least one culture, science, or other cool API. We'll provide a curated list of fun APIs to get your gears turning, but the final destination is up to you.

Potential Quests

• ▸ The Curator: Build a "Daily Masterpiece" bot using The Metropolitan Museum of Art API.
• ▸ The Astronaut: Create a live asteroid tracker or a Mars Rover gallery using NASA Open APIs.
• ▸ The Explorer: Map out biodiversity hotspots using the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
• ▸ The Historian: Connect the dots of the past using the Smithsonian or Library of Congress data.

More Cool APIs

Location & Logistics

• ▸ Make sure to bring your laptop and charger.
• ▸ Where: The Coffee Shop NE, 2852 Johnson St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55418
• ▸ When: 12PM on April 4th

Why join? Because the world's most interesting data is sitting behind an API key, waiting for someone to do something awesome with it. Why not you?