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Articles

Robert Kosara / December 17, 2020

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.

[Read more…] about Video Series: Counting In 2021 with Mechanical Calculators

Robert Kosara / December 8, 2020

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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Robert Kosara / November 18, 2020

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?

[Read more…] about All (Line) Charts are Wrong, But Some Are Useful

Robert Kosara / November 9, 2020

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!

[Read more…] about eagereyesTV: Index Charts, Part 2: Chopping Up and Folding the Time Axis

Robert Kosara / October 29, 2020

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.

[Read more…] about eagereyesTV: Index Charts, Part 1: Making Time Series Data Comparable

Robert Kosara / October 21, 2020

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.

[Read more…] about More Things To Do at VIS: BELIV, VisLies, Social Media Meetup, Etc.

Robert Kosara / October 11, 2020

An Outsider’s Guide to the IEEE VIS Conference 2020

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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Robert Kosara / September 28, 2020

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.

[Read more…] about What Happened to ISOTYPE?

Robert Kosara / September 23, 2020

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.

[Read more…] about New eagereyesTV Video and Series: Chart Appreciation

Robert Kosara / August 31, 2020

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.

[Read more…] about Prior Work We Missed In Our Connected Scatterplots Paper
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