I use a Misfit activity tracker to count my steps. The Misfit app does a decent job of showing me step counts per day and every month, misfit also sends me a summary of the previous month’s activity. Unfortunately, the numbers in that summary are presented without any context, making that summary almost entirely useless. [Read more...] about The Importance of Context
Articles
Joy Plots
Let’s talk about plots and joy. The Joy of Plots, if you will. Also, Joy Plots. [Read more...] about Joy Plots
Building Bridges Between Insular InfoVis Papers
Can you describe what information visualization research does in a few words? What are the driving questions and problems right now? It’s harder than it might seem. I believe that the lack of cohesion in the field is due, at least in part, to how we publish research. [Read more...] about Building Bridges Between Insular InfoVis Papers
EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 3
Thursday and Friday at EuroVis brought a few papers on storytelling, a new toolkit for running online studies, a better way to put your list of publications online, and a lot more. [Read more...] about EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 3
EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 2
On the first full day of the main EuroVis conference, we learned that estimating correlation from scatterplots may not be as great as we thought, saw a number of new ways to show what is and is not in the data, and got some new tools for making browser-based visualization fast. [Read more...] about EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 2
EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 1
EuroVis is currently taking place in Barcelona. In the interest of shorter postings, I’m breaking this report up into three parts. This first part covers the EuroRVVV workshop as well as the opening session and keynote. [Read more...] about EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 1
Paper: An Argument Structure for Data Stories
There is talk about stories having a beginning, middle, and end, but what does that mean for data stories? How do you create the overall structure for those? In a paper to be presented at EuroVis next week, I discuss a simple but very useful structure that I have found "in the wild," and that I believe to be useful and generalizable.
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Paper: Readability and Precision in Pictorial Bar Charts
Embellished charts are common in information graphics. But are embellished bar charts actually harder to read than plain ones? In a short paper to be presented at EuroVis next week, Drew Skau and I present a study that looked into this question. [Read more...] about Paper: Readability and Precision in Pictorial Bar Charts
Paper: Finding a Clear Path: Structuring Strategies for Visualization Sequences
How should you sequence information in a data story so it makes the most sense? Are some sequences better than others? Does time have to move forward or does it not matter? In a paper to be published at EuroVis next week, with Jessica Hullman at UW and my Tableau Research colleague Heidi Lam, we report on a pair of studies that looked into this. [Read more...] about Paper: Finding a Clear Path: Structuring Strategies for Visualization Sequences
InfoVis Papers at CHI 2017
The two main conferences in visualization are VIS and EuroVis, but recently CHI has also gotten some very interesting submissions (CHI is technically a conference about human-computer interaction, or HCI). This year looked particularly strong, [Read more...] about InfoVis Papers at CHI 2017