Want to watch a keynote by a Nobel laureate, catch the presentations of the best papers, or attend a workshop on visualization for communication? The IEEE VIS conference is taking place online in two weeks, October 25 to 30, and is free to attend this year. Here are a few starting points if you’ve never been to VIS and don’t know why you should attend or what to watch.
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What Happened to ISOTYPE?
Jan Willem Tulp asked me an interesting question on Twitter last week: if ISOTYPE was so great, why isn’t anybody using it anymore? Here are some of my thoughts, but more than that I want to see if anybody has more idea, and maybe even a bit of evidence, on why ISOTYPE fell out of fashion in the 1950s and hasn’t really come back since.
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New eagereyesTV Video and Series: Chart Appreciation
Time to breathe new life into my little YouTube channel, which I’m calling eagereyesTV. I’m doing so with the start of a new series I’m calling Chart Appreciation. Each episode will be on one particular visualization, news piece, or interactive. As the first one, I picked Hannah Fairfield’s Driving Safety, in Fits and Starts from 2012.
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Prior Work We Missed In Our Connected Scatterplots Paper
In 2016, Steve Haroz, Steven Franconeri, and I published a paper on a technique commonly called the Connected Scatterplot. It turns out that somebody else had research on essentially the same chart 15 years earlier, which we were not aware of. Our work is quite different, but it’s interesting context and it’s also worth reflecting on how we missed this piece of relevant prior work.
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Tracking 19,000 Runners Over 1,000km Across Virtual Tennessee
How do you show large numbers of people without losing track of the outliers? How do you keep a chart useful when the maximum values are orders of magnitude higher than the common ones? In an animated visualization I’ve built of the progress of over 19,000 runners across a virtual 1000km (635mi) race over 123 days, I’ve tried to solve some of these issues.
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CFP: The Third Workshop on Visualization for Communication (VisComm) at VIS 2020
At IEEE VIS this year, we’re organizing the third Workshop on Visualization for Communication, also known as VisComm. The deadline is July 16, so still plenty of time to put together a paper, whether on communicating around COVID-19 or not. We’re not only looking for the usual academic research, but also visual case studies, which means work by journalists, designers, or non-profits.
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In Praise of the Diagonal Reference Line
Annotations are what set visual communication and journalism apart from just visualization. They often consist of text, but some of the most useful annotations are graphical elements, and many of them are very simple. One type I have a particular fondness for is the diagonal reference line, which has been used to provide powerful context in past news pieces, and is making a comeback in the COVID-19 charts.
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The Visual Evolution of the “Flattening the Curve” Information Graphic
Communication has been quite a challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic, and data visualization hasn’t been the most helpful given the low quality of the data – see Amanda Makulec’s plea to think harder about making another coronavirus chart. A great example of how to do things right is the widely-circulated Flatten the Curve information graphic/cartoon. Here’s a look at the work it is built on and how that has evolved from a figure in an academic paper to one of the clearest pieces of visual communication in some time.
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eagereyesTV: What Is Data? Part 2, Are Images Data?
Visualization turns data into images, but are images themselves data? There are often claims that they are, but then you mostly see the images themselves without much additional data. In this video, I look at image browsers, a project classifying selfies along a number of criteria, and the additional information stored in HEIC that makes things like portrait mode and relighting possible.
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ISOTYPE Book: Young, Prager, There’s Work for All
This book from 1945 contains a very interesting mix of different charts made by the ISOTYPE Institute, some classic and some quite unusual. As a book about labor and unemployment, it also makes extensive use of Gerd Arntz’s famous unemployed man icon.
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