I want to call your attention to three interesting workshops that will be held at VisWeek 2010 in October in Salt Lake City. One is on storytelling in visualization, another on visual analytics in healthcare, and a third one on theory in infovis. The deadlines for two of them are coming up soon.

After covering some Protovis basics in part 1, and some more advanced techniques plus data loading in part 2, this part is devoted mostly to using what we've already discussed in a more complex example. We'll also look at some basic interaction.

Interaction in visualization is incredibly important, but often more tedious than it needs to be. I have developed a new way of brushing in parallel coordinates that uses the multi-touch trackpads on Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops for faster interaction. The video below demonstrates the technique, and the source code is available.

Information visualization is a very applied field that prides itself on its practical applications and real-world scenarios. Ignoring the theoretical side is dangerous, however, because it limits our ability to distill useful information about the foundations of the field from the practical work being done, and limits our understanding of how and why our own creations work. The goal of this workshop at VisWeek 2010 is to bring together researchers interested in the theoretical aspects of visualization, define the field, discuss ideas and approaches, and get the word out about the importance of theoretical research in information visualization.

Showing the impact of visualization work is not something we as a community are particularly good at. The Discovery Exhibition at the Information Visualization conferences is a great venue for doing just that. If you have a tool that's used by real users for real work, submit a brief description by July 19.

On August 1, 2010, the visualization website Verifiable.com will close. If you don't know Verifiable, I recommend checking them out despite this, it's an interesting site that has explored an important niche of the online visualization (visualization-as-a-service, if you will) world. Its demise can teach us a lot about how visualization for the masses works, and what we need to do to actually make it happen.

Beautiful Visualization is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics in visualization. Don't let the title mislead you: while it has its share of artistic visualization, there is also quite a bit of technical information in there. One of the chapters was written by yours truly.