Dots fly across the screen, some of them moving up, some down. They represent black and white boys, and how their income differs from that of their parents and from each other. It’s a great way to show this data in an engaging way and without having to explain percentiles. This is a chart appreciation.
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The Dearth of Videos about Visualization
To appropriate the famous Martin Mull quote, writing about visualization is like dancing about architecture. Why are we using written words, like this blog post, to talk about visualization instead of moving images, like in a video?
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eagereyesTV: Minard’s Famous “Napoleon’s March” Chart – What It Shows, What It Doesn’t
This chart is a staple in every visualization course and many visualization talks. But what does it show, and what does it leave out? There’s a lot more to Napoleon’s Russian Campaign and to Charles Minard’s work than this one chart. My new video looks beyond the surface of what is perhaps the most famous chart out there.
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Felix Auerbach, Die Graphische Darstellung (Graphical Representation, 1914)
This little book covers a large number of different ways of showing data. There are also some mathematical graphs, but the focus is on representations of data “from all areas of science and practice.” It’s a fascinating look into what was known in the early 1900s, and how people thought about graphical representations as tools.
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Video Series: Counting In 2021 with Mechanical Calculators
Mechanical calculators are fascinating. I may have gone down a few rabbit holes on this topic earlier this year, and acquired a few. As a little celebration of the end of this year, and to start the new one, I’m creating a small series of videos about them and releasing one each week.
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eagereyesTV: Chart Appreciation, What’s Really Warming the World
Line charts – they’re not the most glamorous. And yet, they can be used to tell a compelling story about global warming. In this video, I talk about what I consider a modern classic of data journalism, What’s Really Warming the World by Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi: how it works, how it’s structured, and why it works so well.
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All (Line) Charts are Wrong, But Some Are Useful
Line charts are one of the most common and useful charts out there. But why draw straight lines between the data points? They almost never represent what the data is actually doing, no matter if the data is single observations or aggregated over time. How do line charts actually work, and what do they imply about the data?
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eagereyesTV: Index Charts, Part 2: Chopping Up and Folding the Time Axis
I covered the more commonly known value index charts in my my last video on index charts, this one is about indexing on the horizontal, or time, axis. It’s kind of fascinating how you can fold the time axis to get a better view of your data. I show how it works and walk through a number of examples, using housing prices, camera sales, global warming, and even data about my running!
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eagereyesTV: Index Charts, Part 1: Making Time Series Data Comparable
To show change over time, you typically use a line chart. But when you’re comparing time series whose values are very different, the differences between the lines can obscure the changes within them. Index charts can help with that. They align values to a reference, or fold the time axis on itself, or even do both.
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More Things To Do at VIS: BELIV, VisLies, Social Media Meetup, Etc.
For next week’s IEEE VIS conference, here are some more pointers to things that I think are worth checking out in addition to my previous list. This includes a few of the major events as well as some meetups you might otherwise have missed.
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