I started my career as an American Sign Language interpreter. I never expected to cofound an analytics company.
Interpreting taught me ethics, analysis, and how to communicate effectively.
Now, I lead a company where I can show people what’s possible with data. I hear the gasps, the sighs, and the river of ideas as I demo. It’s freedom to play, to dream, to make things easier. I get to be on calls and hear the excitement and the plans.
In a way, I’m still interpreting, but interpreting from data to insight; from charts and graphs to real understanding and interaction; and from rigid confines of what was to the freedom of what could be.
In 2010, I was part of the committee that selected Tableau. Faced with an insurmountable manual workload, we looked for automation, but we were also planning for rolling out to a mobile deployment.
From hiring calculators to responses to Requests for Proposals to urgent requests for information and client reporting, I was able to use Tableau to sift through data and find answers. By 2014, I hungered for more and moved into Tableau consulting full time.
2015 was a year of change. I started interacting with the community, blogging, and presenting at the Tableau Conference. In 2016, I was humbled and honored to receive Tableau’s highest recognition as a Tableau Visionary and am now in the Hall of Fame after 6+ years. This community is humbling and kind. I hope to pay it forward to the next generation of leaders.
Today, I’m the Chief Visualization Officer at Versalytix, a global analytics enabler. We provide consulting, staffing, and application development. Contact me to learn more.
Focus Areas
Ethics
What do we owe others? Ethics exist between morals and laws. They’re a speed bump to our processes to force us to slow down and review our surroundings. Ethical practice forces us to ask hard questions and explore potential harm.
My focus is on translating applied ethics to the data world.
Functional Aesthetics
This is leagues beyond “making it pretty” - form and function merge completely. With practices from cognitive psychology, design, information retrieval, and visual communication, functional aesthetics is about harnessing beauty to inform use.
My work centers on applying these practices in a business context, which includes branding.
Natural Language Processing
I started my career analyzing language. Beyond word clouds, sentiment scores, and noun-verb pairs, I’m interested in both humanizing and understanding discourse patterns, emotions, and intent.
My practical experience includes open text, speech analytics, and survey responses.
Data Literacy
Beyond the chart, data literacy involves being able to navigate the entire ecosystem of data. From inputs to storage, to how we shape and define it, to the analysis and output, data literacy starts where its collected.
My goal is to humanize the life cycle of data and make sure the humanity in the data isn’t lost.
Tableau +
I’ve spent over 10 years with the Tableau ecosystem, starting in Desktop and Server, but branching out to include Prep and peripheral products like Alteryx and DataRobot.
Beyond pretty, I believe elegant dashboards inform, guide, and mentor end users.
Communicating Data Science
It’s not enough to run models and provide numbers. Data science requires communication, clarity, and transparency to be used. Responsible data science relies on clarifying inputs, outputs, and assumptions.
I work with teams to make data science usable and explainable.
Am I presenting for you?
Interpreter turned analyst, Bridget Cogley brings an interdisciplinary approach to data analytics. As Chief Visualization Officer at Versalytix, her role uplifts data visualization within the org and helps shape the vision. Her dynamic, engaging presentation style is paired with thought-provoking content, including ethics and data visualization linguistics. She has a deep interest in the nuances of communication, having been an American Sign Language Interpreter for nine years. She is currently a Tableau Hall of Fame Visionary. Her work incorporates human-centric dashboard design, an anthropological take on design, ethics, and language. She extensively covers speech analytics and open text. Prior to consulting, Bridget managed an analytics department, which included vetting and selecting Tableau, creating views in the database, and building comprehensive reporting. She also has experience in training, HR, managing, and sales support.