Blog

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

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

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

I'm giving a public lecture next Tuesday, February 21, at the University of Washington (UW). This is at the invitation of Professor Karen Cheng at the School of Art + Art History + Design. I will talk about what we know and what we don't know about visualization, and how we can expand our knowledge. [Read more...] about Come To My Talk At UW On Tuesday, February 21