EagerEyes.org

Venn diagrams are a strange mix of structure and data visualization. In my latest Sightings column (PDF) for American Scientist, I use the example of a visualization challenge from last year to discuss different ways to show the same data about diagnosis techniques for autism in young children. This also sparked the launch of a new site feature: Ask Eagereyes. More ...

What do pies, waffles, and donuts have in common? They're charts, or rather metaphors for popular charts. Why do we need to name charts after food? And what can we learn from this for getting the idea of visualization across more effectively? More ...

I saw a presentation about business dashboard software by a guy from MicroStrategy yesterday, and started to wonder about the ethics of attribution in the business world. He showed a demo of a "bubble chart" that happened to be about fertility rate and life expectancy in different parts of the world over the last 20 years – in other words, Hans Rosling's example and visualization. There was no attribution, he made it sound like he had come up with that himself. More ...

Email is still a useful transport mechanism for data (like Google Analytics, etc.), despite ftp, web services, etc. Some websites offer email for cheap, while other access can cost a lot of money. Email is also a push service, meaning you do not have to ask periodically if new data has arrived - if you do it right. Of course, that service is rather useless without an automated way to get that data into a database. Here is an introduction to the procmail program and the ancient art of the Unix mail filter. More ...

Jeff Heer asked me to talk more about the Design, Vision, and Visualization workshop at VisWeek, so here is a list of questions we came up with. While we were not able to discuss them at great length, I think they're very valid, and might lead to a better understanding about how to connect the design and visualization worlds. More ...

I always wondered how much those swing states actually swing. So I looked at the results of presidential elections over the last 100 years, and it's not easy to determine which states actually are swing states from just looking at their history. Rather, there seems to be a pattern of relative stability for a few election cycles, and then big, sweeping wins for one side. More ...

The New York Times' new Visualization Lab uses IBM's Many Eyes technology. While it provides easy access to a wealth of visualization techniques and the possibility to comment, there is one major difference: only data provided by the NY Times can be used. The kind and quality of that data will determine the success of this new site. More ...