Venn diagrams are a strange mix of structure and data visualization. In my latest Sightings column (PDF) for American Scientist, I use the example of a visualization challenge from last year to discuss different ways to show the same data about diagnosis techniques for autism in young children. This also sparked the launch of a new site feature: Ask Eagereyes.
What do pies, waffles, and donuts have in common? They're charts, or rather metaphors for popular charts. Why do we need to name charts after food? And what can we learn from this for getting the idea of visualization across more effectively?
I saw a presentation about business dashboard software by a guy from MicroStrategy yesterday, and started to wonder about the ethics of attribution in the business world. He showed a demo of a "bubble chart" that happened to be about fertility rate and life expectancy in different parts of the world over the last 20 years – in other words, Hans Rosling's example and visualization. There was no attribution, he made it sound like he had come up with that himself.
Email is still a useful transport mechanism for data (like Google Analytics, etc.), despite ftp, web services, etc. Some websites offer email for cheap, while other access can cost a lot of money. Email is also a push service, meaning you do not have to ask periodically if new data has arrived - if you do it right. Of course, that service is rather useless without an automated way to get that data into a database. Here is an introduction to the procmail program and the ancient art of the Unix mail filter.
Jeff Heer asked me to talk more about the Design, Vision, and Visualization workshop at VisWeek, so here is a list of questions we came up with. While we were not able to discuss them at great length, I think they're very valid, and might lead to a better understanding about how to connect the design and visualization worlds.
I always wondered how much those swing states actually swing. So I looked at the results of presidential elections over the last 100 years, and it's not easy to determine which states actually are swing states from just looking at their history. Rather, there seems to be a pattern of relative stability for a few election cycles, and then big, sweeping wins for one side.
The New York Times' new Visualization Lab uses IBM's Many Eyes technology. While it provides easy access to a wealth of visualization techniques and the possibility to comment, there is one major difference: only data provided by the NY Times can be used. The kind and quality of that data will determine the success of this new site.
During VisWeek 2008, I wrote short updates on my website, which I called glimpses (a little pun on tweet). This is an archive of all of those, in reverse chronological order. In my transition to WordPress, I had to get rid of the comments, unfortunately. There were only a small number of those attached to these postings, though.
VisWeek 2008 was an interesting set of conferences again. The live-blog is now archived, and here are a few thoughts on blogging a conference. I had a long summary written up, but it was mostly redundant with the live-blog, so it makes more sense to go there. I will write up further things at greater length over the next few weeks.
A story is making the rounds recently that the Obama campaign has received many contributions with "odd" amounts (i.e., not whole dollars), which is supposedly proof that Obama was being funded by foreign money. Here is a quick look at the data, which shows some interesting patterns, but no evidence of foreign intervention.
The New York Times has an interesting interactive visualization on the influence of presidents on the economy. They ask, Can a President Tame the Business Cycle? The visualization they use is not bad, but would be much more readable if it used a better color scale.
As promised earlier, I will be live-blogging VisWeek 2008, which will take place next week in Columbus, OH. I will mostly attend InfoVis and VAST, with the odd Vis session and workshop thrown in. The live-blog will appear in a box at the top of the frontpage, and there will be a separate RSS feed for these posts. Coverage should start Sunday (October 19) morning, and there will also be pictures.
In January, my Ph.D. student Caroline Ziemkiewicz told me about an interesting observation she had made: in different papers comparing tree visualizations, treemaps came out as best, worst, or somewhere in the middle. One difference she noticed was how the questions were worded: when a levels metaphor was used, treemaps did badly; a containment metaphor, on the other hand, seemed to favor treemaps. So we decided to investigate – the result will be presented at InfoVis on Monday, October 20.
Proteins are inherently three-dimensional, complex structures. To understand them, we need to simplify them to focus their main structural components. Jane Richardson has played a key role in the visual language that we use today when talking about proteins: ribbons and spirals. I interviewed her recently for the Sightings column in American Scientist.
A few days ago, I looked at how the electoral college system amplifies the lead of the strongest candidate in a US presidential election. The way I made the chart (with the help of PhotoShop) created some interesting reactions, and finally led me to what I consider the best way to do it (using stacked bar charts). I also want to respond to a few comments about the kind of chart used and why I think it is the most effective way to show what it does.
What a difference 22 years make! In 1986, George Furnas published his paper, Generalized Fisheye Views, which described what was to become one of the first (and most prominent) focus+context techniques. One of the examples he used was a calendar that showed the current day in most detail, with less space for the surrounding ones. Yahoo! just started an opt-in beta of their new calendar that uses the same idea.
The Electoral College is a key aspect of the US presidential elections. Its mechanics and distribution of electors are crucial for presidential campaigns and determine the so-called battleground states – and possibly also distort the will of the people. I was interested this last effect, so I did a little analysis.
This site turns two today. There have been frantic periods of posting and periods of silence. There have been times when I thought nobody would read this and times when I had more than 50,000 visitors in a day. Here is a bit of history, some thoughts on what the site has accomplished, and what I am planning for the future.
Images speak louder than words. A lot louder. It would be hard to find a more vivid and impressive visualization of what happened today on the New York Stock Exchange.
There's new competition for Swivel and Many Eyes: iCharts. A good name, to be sure, but will they live up to their promise of being "YouTube for Charts" (a claim Swivel also made in the beginning)? A first look at their website suggests that they likely will not.
The New York Times uses some of the best information graphics and visualizations on its web site and in the printed paper. But there is also a strange undercurrent of bad graphics, many of which commissioned from other sources, and often published in the New York Times Magazine. It almost feels like between all the good graphs, they need an outlet for the crazy stuff.
One of the most common mistakes in chart design is to scale an area by two sides at the same time, producing a quadratic effect for a linear change. That overstates the larger numbers and produces a badly skewed chart. A little care and some basic high-school math can help avoid the problem.
SPSS recently released their new Viz Designer, a visualization engine built on Leland Wilkinson's work (The Grammar of Graphics and nViZn). The comparison with Tableau is unavoidable since both are based on the same underlying ideas. Right now, Viz Designer does not look good in that comparison.
Engaging viewers with interesting depictions of data always bears the risk of creating misleading or unreadable graphics. The square pie chart (or waffle chart) strikes a good balance between being interesting and not distorting the data. Here is an argument for the power of the pie and against the boredom of the bar.
In some fields, contests drive research and the entire field forward. Those contests are prestigious, and people list the fact that they won the contest in their CVs. In InfoVis, the contest is trying to appeal to researchers, but is getting little attention. What should the role of the contest be? And how can we make it more interesting?
The EagerEyes Labs' mission is to provide tools to gain insight into relevant data to everybody. As part of that, the plan has always been to release the source code. The first piece of code is now published, and more is coming.
Would McCain be the oldest US President? Would Obama be the youngest? Who was the youngest president? Were presidents younger in the past or older? What is the highest number of years a former president lived after leaving office? Who served the longest? Whose term was the shortest? The interactive visualization below lets you answer these and a few other questions.
How do bats fly? What are the aerodynamic conditions around their wings? And how do you visualize all that? I did a short interview with David Laidlaw (PDF), who has collaborated with physicists, biologists, fluid mechanics experts, and others, to create a poster that won last year's NSF Visualization Challenge. The interview was done for American Scientist's Sightings column, which I have been invited to write.
Jock D. Mackinlay was working on information visualization long before the field or the term even existed. His Ph.D. thesis on the automatic visual representation of data translated Bertin's semiological texts into a useful piece of software (and badly-needed visualization theory). His work also includes Cone Trees, the Perspective Wall, an analysis of the visualization design space, as well as the Readings in Information Visualization (together with Stuart Card and Ben Shneiderman). Mackinlay worked at PARC from 1986 to 2004, when he joined Tableau Software – a company based on a Ph.D. thesis inspired by his work 15 years earlier.
What is a visualization? The word is problematic, and there have been very few definitions that try to define this field we are working in. More importantly: what is not a visualization? It is easy to argue that anything visual is a visualization in some way – but does that mean anything? Here is a definition of visualization and a few examples to illustrate the different criteria.
When Al Gore talks about global warming, Hans Rosling shows the relationship between health and wealth, and the New York Times visualizes primary results and American consumer debt, they communicate visually. But they only use visual representation to get their point across, as a means to an end. When we want to show why visualization is effective, we have to care about the message, too – not just the method.
I'm not generally a big YouTube fan. Sure, I've watched all the funny cat movies and seen people dump Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke. But little else has made me go there in some months. This has changed, though, with a new feature of the website: The YouTube Screen Room. Twice a month, four independent short films are added to the site, and the quality is amazing.
Colin Ware's latest book Visual Thinking for Design has a promising subtitle: active vision, attention, visual queries, gist, visual skills, color, narrative, design. That's covering quite a bit of ground, and also a lot of things not usually considered in visualization. While this is a book about design, I was interested in what it could teach people in InfoVis, and I review it from that point of view.
My colleague Celine Latulipe has made a nice website about her Dance.Draw project. In what she calls Exquisite Interaction, three dancers wield inertial mice and thus control shapes in a projection behind them. The result is interesting and beautiful.
A paper on visualization criticism just appeared in the Visualization Viewpoints section of this month's Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A). Authors are yours truly, Fritz Drury, Lars Erik Holmquist, and David Laidlaw.
The City College of New York will be hosting a visualization day on April 30, with a very interesting line-up of speakers: Ben Shneiderman (who is also listed as a sponsor), Matthew Ericson (NY Times), Catherine Plaisant (University of Maryland), Martin Wattenberg (IBM/Many Eyes), and others.
Treemaps are the single most used 'real' InfoVis technique there is. Interestingly, they have proven to be even more useful for unstructured data than for the hierarchies which they were originally developed for. Here is a brief history, discussion of current practical uses, and of the importance of treemaps for the adoption and understanding of information visualization.
On April 24 and 25, the Charlotte Visualization Center at UNC Charlotte will host its second symposium, titled Visualization in the World. We have an impressive line-up of speakers and are expecting fascinating discussions.
Data is being set free: the United Nations have started a new website called UN Data to share the data collected by a number of UN agencies. 55 million data records are waiting to be explored and visualized. The search interface is very nice and usable, but still lacks power.
While reading Jarke van Wijk's Views on Visualization(ref), I could not help but notice the negative references he makes to the subjectivity of visualization. A visualization science on par with statistics would certainly require the elimination of any and all subjectivity. I do not think that visualization is such a science, or that it being that is even all that desirable.
