eagereyes.orgVisualization and Visual Communication

Paper: Business Data Visualization, Beyond the Boring

The words 'business' and 'data visualization' probably put you to sleep before you even reach the end of this sentence. But wake up! There's actually a lot of interesting work to be done in this area, if only we give it a chance.

Posted October 29, 2024

The New York Times now has a web Flash player

Before we had D3 and all this fancy web technology, interactive news pieces on the web were usually built using Adobe Flash. Since the demise of Flash, they have all been broken, but now the NY Times has added a web-based Flash player to their archives so they can be experienced again in all their interactive glory!

Posted January 8, 2024

Rainbow Colormaps Are Not All Bad (Paper)

Rainbow colormaps are among the most derided ideas in data visualization, second only to pie charts. And yet, people use them. Why? A recent paper looks at some of the reasons why they are so popular and points to research showing that they might not be so bad if used for the right tasks. There's even opportunity for interesting research in rainbow colormaps!

Posted July 12, 2023

Pie Charts

Learn about how they work, and what we know and don't know about them

YouTube Videos

My 'eagereyesTV' videos about chart types, data journalism, data, etc.

Blog Archive

Almost 600 posts from the eagereyes blog, going all the way back to 2006

Paper: Notebooks for Data Analysis and Visualization

Computational notebooks offer an alternative to the common GUI-based tools used for data visualization and BI today. In this new paper, I talk about what they are, their pros and cons, and how research could fill in some important gaps.

Posted May 1, 2023

Course on Data Vis Fundamentals and Best Practices

I'm teaching a short course on data visualization for Observable. It's free, and you should join! Starts March 7.

Posted February 23, 2023

New video: Exploring the connections between companies with They Rule

Josh On's They Rule is back, and I've made a video about it.

Posted February 9, 2023

Site Changes Coming, How to Follow Sites, and Where I've Been

This site has been around for over 16 years now, and a lot has changed in the world during that time. I'm currently working on an overhaul and wanted to give everybody an idea of what I'm thinking about and why there has been little activity. In light of recent developments, here are also some good ways to follow good old-fashioned blogs and an alternative to Twitter.

Posted November 6, 2022

Midjourney is a Trip

Of the several AI-powered systems that can create images from text prompts, MidJourney is the most easily accessible one right now. I've had some fun playing with it.

Posted June 28, 2022

New video: Gauges for Data Visualization, The NY Times Election Needle, and Circular Bar Charts

Gauges aren't very popular in visualization, but they have some interesting properties. There is, of course, the infamous NY Times "election needle," but you're probably using gauges every day without giving them too much thought. There's also an interesting connection with circular bar charts, which I think can work well when used as part-to-whole charts. I talk about all of this in my new video.

Posted May 17, 2022

Watch My Outlier Talk: This Should Have Been A Bar Chart!

I gave a talk at the Outlier conference earlier this year, with the somewhat elaborate title, The Joys – and Dangers – of Bespoke and Unusual Chart Types. Though I eventually decided to go with the much shorter, This Should Have Been A Bar Chart! You can watch it on YouTube now.

Posted April 26, 2022

Paper: More Than Meets the Eye: A Closer Look at Encodings in Visualization

Encodings play a central role in visualization, but I believe our thinking about them is too simplistic. In a new paper, I argue that we need to distinguish between the encodings that specify how a visualization is drawn and the ones that are readable or actually read by an observer. While they largely or entirely overlap in some charts (like bar charts or scatterplots) they don't in others (pie charts, line charts, etc.). And what exactly do you even specify in more complex visualizations like treemaps?

Posted April 19, 2022

The (Possible) Stratagem Behind the Biden Bar

A bar chart with a distorted vertical axis isn't very unusual. But what if that chart was posted by the White House and what if it was done on purpose – not to overstate the number shown, but rather to evoke a particular kind of response?

Posted January 30, 2022