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.
[Read more...] about Paper: An Argument Structure for Data Stories
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
Linkstravaganza: Schwabish’s Story Links and Andrews’ Seeking Minard
I don't normally do link dumps, but since I'm behind on blogging and have been meaning to link to these things for a while… here are some articles for you to check out. The first set is on what storytelling means with data, the second about an interesting discovery around Charles Minard. [Read more...] about Linkstravaganza: Schwabish’s Story Links and Andrews’ Seeking Minard
Averages Are Metadata
When we think of metadata, we tend to think of attributes that describe the data. Where do the numbers come from? What do the values in a categorical column mean? Etc. But there is a type of metadata we rarely even recognize as such: values computed from the data. They're often treated as part of the data, but that's a mistake. [Read more...] about Averages Are Metadata
Huge Percentages Are Meaningless
Percentages are incredibly useful when talking about how something is a part of something larger: this many percent tax, that many percent of people are unemployed, etc. When percentages are much larger than 100, however, they lose their meaning and their usefulness. Unfortunately, they seem to be increasingly common. [Read more...] about Huge Percentages Are Meaningless