A new series by the New York Times is equally exciting and painful: it presents visualizations for discussion in class, but the outside help they are getting is coming from statistics rather than visualization. It’s another reminder of just how far we still have to go to even be noticed as a research field. [Read more...] about Visualization as a Field Is Still Invisible
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Review: Putting Stories to Work and Out On the Wire
Two books I’ve read recently make good points about stories that apply to data stories, without the books being about data: Shawn Callahan’s Putting Stories to Work and Jessica Abel’s Out On the Wire. [Read more...] about Review: Putting Stories to Work and Out On the Wire
The Season of Storytelling: Kicking It Off With A Podcast
It's (almost) Fall – a good time for telling stories! Jon Schwabish invited me to be on his PolicyViz podcast again to kick off its new season. And I have a long list of things to write about around that topic, too.
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Communicating Uncertainty When Lives Are on the Line
Showing when and where natural disasters like hurricanes are going to cause damage is not just a question of aesthetics – it is literally a matter of life and death. The traditional way hurricane forecasts are shown has a number of problems, but are the alternatives actually better? [Read more...] about Communicating Uncertainty When Lives Are on the Line
The Importance of Context
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
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