How do we read pie charts? This seems like a straightforward question to answer, but it turns out that most of what you’ve probably heard is wrong. We don’t actually know whether we use angle, area, or arc length. In a short paper at the VIS conference this week I’m presenting a study I ran to answer this question – a study using 3D pie charts!
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Paper: Evidence for Area as the Primary Visual Cue in Pie Charts
How we read pie charts is still an open question: is it angle? Is it area? Is it arc length? In a study I’m presenting as a short paper at the IEEE VIS conference in Vancouver next week, I tried to tease the visual cues apart – using modeling and 3D pie charts.
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eagereyesTV Episode 2: Unit Charts, Dot Plots, ISOTYPE, and What Makes Them Special
Charts usually show values as visual properties, like the length in a bar chart, the location in a scatterplot, the area in a bubble chart, etc. Unit charts show values as multiples instead. One famous example of these charts is called ISOTYPE, and you may have seen them in information graphics as well. They’re an interesting family of charts and they seem to have some unusual properties that most other charts don’t have.
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XIII
This website is nw thirteen years old. While it has slowed down somewhat recently, it’s still alive and kicking. Now in its teens, it is looking for new experiences and trying out new things.
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Data: Intent and Primary Interpretation
Take a JPEG image file and a CSV file. Which of these two is data? Is one of them more obviously data than the other? I think the key difference is the intent behind the data and its primary interpretation.
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Introducing eagereyesTV, My New YouTube Channel
After writing about visualization for over a decade, it’s time to mix things up a bit and try a new medium: video. I just uploaded the first video to my new YouTube channel, which I’m calling eagereyesTV. Take a look and tell me what you think!
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eagereyesTV Episode 1: The DataSaurus, Anscombe’s Quartet, and why summary statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt
When dealing with large amounts of data, we often use summary statistics like average, median, standard deviation, sum, etc. They’re useful because they actually hide data, they reduce the amount of information we need to look at to give us a sense of the data. But the same averages and can describe datasets that look vastly different.
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Highlights from EuroVis 2019, Part 2
This is the second part of my highlights from EuroVis earlier this year in Porto, Portugal. There are papers about decision making and interaction, as well as a report on the capstone talk and a look to next year’s conference, which will be a bit different.
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Highlights from EuroVis 2019, Part 1
The EuroVis 2019 conference took place in early June this year in Porto, Portugal. While I enjoyed the city and conference venue, I found the program a bit underwhelming this time around. I’ve kept pushing off writing this report because I found myself griping rather than talking about the content.
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What Is A Misleading Chart?
I see a lot of discussions of misleading charts lately, and there are certainly many of them out there. One distinction that isn’t always made, but that I feel is important, is whether the chart itself is poorly designed, or whether an otherwise correct chart is taken to mean something it does not. It’s an important difference that often gets glossed over.
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