At IEEE VIS this year, we're organizing the third Workshop on Visualization for Communication, also known as VisComm. The deadline is July 16, so still plenty of time to put together a paper, whether on communicating around COVID-19 or not. We're not only looking for the usual academic research, but also visual case studies, which means work by journalists, designers, or non-profits.
Blog
In Praise of the Diagonal Reference Line
Annotations are what set visual communication and journalism apart from just visualization. They often consist of text, but some of the most useful annotations are graphical elements, and many of them are very simple. One type I have a particular fondness for is the diagonal reference line, which has been used to provide powerful context in past news pieces, and is making a comeback in the COVID-19 charts.
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The Visual Evolution of the “Flattening the Curve” Information Graphic
Communication has been quite a challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic, and data visualization hasn't been the most helpful given the low quality of the data – see Amanda Makulec's plea to think harder about making another coronavirus chart. A great example of how to do things right is the widely-circulated Flatten the Curve information graphic/cartoon. Here's a look at the work it is built on and how that has evolved from a figure in an academic paper to one of the clearest pieces of visual communication in some time.
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Review: Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie
Alberto Cairo’s new book, How Charts Lie, takes readers on a tour of how charts are used and misused, and teaches them how to not be misled. It’s a useful book for both makers and consumers of charts, in the news, business, and pretty much anywhere else.
eagereyesTV: What is Data? Part 1, File Formats and Intent
We all use data all the time, but what exactly is data? How do different programs know what to do with our data? How is visualizing data different from other uses of data? And isn’t everything inside a computer data in the end?
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Prolific, the (Much Better) Mechnical Turk Alternative
Prolific is a crowd-sourcing platform for running studies. In contrast to the widely-used Mechanical Turk, it’s specific to studies, has a much better interface, pricing that’s fair to participants, and useful filters to find the right people for your study.
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eagereyesTV Episode 3: 3D Pie Charts For Science!
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.
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.