HTML5 is an upcoming new standard not just for web markup, but also new graphical features. It will make it possible to build interactive visualizations right in the web browser, written in JavaScript. And despite what you might think about JavaScript, they will be fast.
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to visit the strange land of NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), a kingdom in the far corners of the West, where the Machine Learners dwell. Some of the noblemen there had invited me so that the locals could get a close-up look at one of us Visualization People at one of their workshops.
John Snow's map of the cholera dead after London's 1854 epidemic is often heralded as one of the earliest examples of graphical data analysis. Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map gives a lot of background about the London of the 1850s, Snow's work, and how central the map really was.
After my interview with Swivel founders Brian Mulloy and Dmitry Dimov on what happened to Swivel.com, I felt there were still many open questions. So I reached out to Halsey Minor, whose (cleverly-named) incubator Minor Ventures had funded Swivel, and who had made the decision to pull the plug. In this interview, he talks about his issues with Swivel, his priorities in developing products, and what it would take to bring Swivel back.
Storytelling was a big topic at VisWeek this year: there was a workshop, a panel, and at least one paper about how to tell stories with visualization. One sentence I heard over and over was, "this photo/visualization/illustration tells a great story." But pictures don't tell stories, people do. An image, a visualization, data, etc. can only be the material the story is made from. I think it's going to be important for visualization to understand this fundamental difference.
Enrico Bertini and I will host a Birds-of-a-Feather meeting Thursday night on Blogging in Visualization. We will talk about our experiences, answer questions, and hopefully dispel some myths about blogging in science. Whether you're going or not, I recommend reading the article You Aren’t Blogging Yet?!? in The Scientist.
Theory is a big topic at VisWeek this year. You can get through almost the entire conference purely on theory papers. Whether that's a good idea is another question of course, but here's a guide how to do it.
Can gravity have an influence on how the data in a chart is perceived? How do different kinds of connections between circles change our perception of the distance between them? And what does that mean for how strongly we perceive them to be connected? We conducted some user studies to find out.
Parallel coordinates are a very popular visualization technique for multi-dimensional numerical data. In this paper, we propose a set of metrics to better understand the types of visual structures users commonly look for using this technique. Based on the metrics, we can optimize the display to make it more readable, and allow the user to select dimensions based on their visual structures, rather than their existing ideas about the data.
This year's VisWeek conference has a distinct theory scent. It starts with the workshop, The Role of Theory in Information Visualization on Monday, and ends with a panel on theory on Friday. There is also a related BOF and a paper session at Vis.
2010 has not been a kind year for visualization. Three key people who have made a large impact in the field have passed away this year (in decreasing order of age): Jacques Bertin, Jim Thomas, and Dirk Bartz. They will be sorely missed.
With only just over a week left until VisWeek 2010, it's time for VisWeek Bingo!
Earlier this summer, the visualization website Swivel.com disappeared from the internet. To find out what happened, I tracked down and interviewed Swivel's two founders, Brian Mulloy and Dmitry Dimov.
A question that I have been asked a few times recently is: what about visualization for the blind? Would it make sense to provide a textual representation? What about a representation that you can feel and touch, isn't that a visualization? And is there perhaps more to visualization than just the pictures?
Today marks the fourth anniversary of this humble little website. I've spent countless hours writing, designing, arguing, and thinking about the things that I publish here. What others may consider a waste of time has helped me tremendously to make new connections, meet new people, refine my thinking, and broaden my horizons. If you're not running a website (or blog), you're really losing out.
You all know what statistics is, right? I mean, everybody knows. But if you had to explain why it's useful, and what it's useful for, would you have an answer? Do you know how statistics makes a difference in all our lives, all the time? Even if you (think you) do, check out Kaiser Fung's book, Numbers Rule Your World.
Visualization needs a new theory. Bertin's ideas about marks and retinal variables have provided a great starting point, but we are now seeing their limitations. We need to turn a new page and move beyond those cosy, familiar ideas, into new territory. A recent paper by Caroline Ziemkiewicz and myself makes an argument why, and provides some possible directions.
There are thousands of visualizations on Many Eyes, but there is little in terms of further analysis and deeper discussion. There are dozens of visualization websites now that let you upload your data, but they all provide the same few visualization techniques and practically no analysis tools. While visualization for the masses may be here, we're not actually seeing much analysis from those same masses.
We have received a few good submissions for the InfoVis Theory Workshop at VisWeek, but we're looking for some more. We are therefore opening submissions again, with a new, final deadline: September 13, 2010. If you couldn't make the first deadline, this is your chance.
It's nice to see an idea evolve and get picked up by other people. Which is why I'm excited to have spotted the first third-party implementation of Parallel Sets in the wild: a (Windows-only) program called Knowledge Blocks that allows you to visually piece together a query and show the results in a table or a Parallel Sets display.
Theoretical research is a tough sell, and not just in computer science. Not only are we expected to produce things we can demo, it's also hard to tell beforehand what exactly the results will be. But that is exactly why we need to do research: because we don't know. Applied research is obviously important, but the current trend towards only applied work is worrying.
What is the key difference between a visualization and a data-based infographic? The visualization is created by a program that can be applied to many datasets, the infographic is hand-crafted for a particular dataset. It's obvious, which is why it's so hard to figure out.
Direct multi-touch interaction is all the rage right now on mobile devices like iPhones and iPads. Apple is working on a lesser-known variation that is just as useful, but used in their less glamorous laptop computers. The latest development has been their Magic Trackpad, which brings that type of interaction (with some new twists) to the desktop.
The first episode of season 4 of Mad Men opens with Don Draper being interviewed by a journalist. He doesn't tell him anything that's of interest and then dodges the question Who is Don Draper? by claiming that he was taught as a child not to talk about himself. Scientists do an equally terrible job at communication, and for many of the same reasons. Cornelia Dean's book Am I Making Myself Clear? offers fascinating insights into both journalism and science, and provides concrete ideas for how to do better.
I want to call your attention to three interesting workshops that will be held at VisWeek 2010 in October in Salt Lake City. One is on storytelling in visualization, another on visual analytics in healthcare, and a third one on theory in infovis. The deadlines for two of them are coming up soon.
After covering some Protovis basics in part 1, and some more advanced techniques plus data loading in part 2, this part is devoted mostly to using what we've already discussed in a more complex example. We'll also look at some basic interaction.
Interaction in visualization is incredibly important, but often more tedious than it needs to be. I have developed a new way of brushing in parallel coordinates that uses the multi-touch trackpads on Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops for faster interaction. The video below demonstrates the technique, and the source code is available.
Information visualization is a very applied field that prides itself on its practical applications and real-world scenarios. Ignoring the theoretical side is dangerous, however, because it limits our ability to distill useful information about the foundations of the field from the practical work being done, and limits our understanding of how and why our own creations work. The goal of this workshop at VisWeek 2010 is to bring together researchers interested in the theoretical aspects of visualization, define the field, discuss ideas and approaches, and get the word out about the importance of theoretical research in information visualization.
Showing the impact of visualization work is not something we as a community are particularly good at. The Discovery Exhibition at the Information Visualization conferences is a great venue for doing just that. If you have a tool that's used by real users for real work, submit a brief description by July 19.
On August 1, 2010, the visualization website Verifiable.com will close. If you don't know Verifiable, I recommend checking them out despite this, it's an interesting site that has explored an important niche of the online visualization (visualization-as-a-service, if you will) world. Its demise can teach us a lot about how visualization for the masses works, and what we need to do to actually make it happen.
Beautiful Visualization is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics in visualization. Don't let the title mislead you: while it has its share of artistic visualization, there is also quite a bit of technical information in there. One of the chapters was written by yours truly.
The second installment of the Protovis tutorial introduces some more of its JavaScript-specific features like scales, shows how to anchor marks on other marks, and how to use rules. We also start using real data, and learn how to load that data from a remote source.
Acceptance rates are one of the key ways of measuring the quality of conferences. I think it's time we collect that data for conferences relevant to visualization. I have put together a page for this, and have found some of that data. But I need your help to fill in the gaps and suggest other conferences that would be of interest.
Protovis is a very powerful visualization toolkit. Part of what makes it special is that it is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser without the need for any plugins. Its clever use of JavaScript's language features makes it very elegant, but it can also be confusing to people who are not familiar with functional programming concepts and the finer points of JavaScript. This multi-part tutorial shows how to create a visualization (my interactive Presidents Chart) in Protovis, and explains the concepts that are involved along the way.
Design is usually considered a minor point in visualization. Does it make a difference what color scheme you use (as long as it's not an atrocious one), how thick your lines are, whether you put a background behind your chart, etc.? Caroline Ziemkiewicz and I presented a paper at Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) where we reported on a study we had performed to find out.
Information graphics (infographics) have gotten a bad rep lately because of a sudden wave of badly designed, uninformative graphics. But when they are done right, infographics can be both highly informative and enjoyable to look at and discover. Here are a few recent examples to demonstrate that.
Parallel coordinates are one of the most famous visualization techniques, and among the most common subjects of academic papers in visualization. While initially confusing, they are a very powerful tool for understanding multi-dimensional numerical datasets.
Is visualization art? Are video games art? Is programming art? Is art art? You can discuss these questions at length, but without concrete criteria, they end up being academic exercises rather than leading to some kind of conclusion. One criterion, which I believe to be suited especially well for visualization, is the sublime. Art is sublime, visualization is not. Hence, visualization is not art.
There is almost universal agreement that any extraneous elements in a chart or visualization, elements that do not represent numbers, are detrimental to understanding the data. A paper that was presented at CHI recently described a study to figure out just how bad all this chart junk really was. As it turns out, it's actually rather helpful.
User studies are an important part of visualization, but they also require a considerable amount of effort and time. In a paper presented at the BELIV workshop (part of CHI 2010), we discussed our experiences with running a number of visualization studies using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) service. Using MTurk, we are able to run large studies in much less time than usual, and at very low cost. We also show how to avoid gaming the system, which had been reported in earlier work using MTurk.
Visualization is not a very clearly defined field. There are many variations, ways of doing it, and ideas around it. That is valuable, because it keeps the field moving and brings in fresh ideas. But it also brings with it people who like using visualization's tools and talk about visualization, but what they are doing is something else. We need to start calling these things what they are: a cargo cult of visualization.
Proteins are among the most complex structures we know. They consist of thousands of atoms, and fold into complex shapes to perform a variety of functions. Understanding how they work is not possible from looking at single atoms, but rather at the overall, three-dimensional structure. The visual language for doing this was developed by Jane Richardson.
2010 is The Year of Information Visualization Theory. Here's why.
Terrible charts seem to be in season. Rarely have I come across so many incredibly bad charts in such a short time: information graphics that don't actually depict data, distorted representations, useless color schemes, and the worst pie chart ever.
With all the data that is now available, more powerful tools are needed to make more sense of it. Tableau Public provides some of the most powerful visualization tools available today, and it's free to use with public data.
Apple's iTunes Store is counting down to the ten-billionth (10,000,000,000th) song download. As in previous cases when they were running a download counter on their website, I am harvesting the data and visualizing it below.
Most data visualization on the web consists of static images. Typical interactive visualizations use Flash or Java, both of which have drawbacks and require plugins, don't work on mobile devices, etc. A number of recent visualization tools based on JavaScript promise to finally bring visualization to life on the web. The ways they work differ, but they all profit from recent advances in JavaScript performance across all modern browsers.
Pie charts are perhaps the most ubiquitous chart type; they can be found in newspapers, business reports, and many other places. But few people actually understand the function of the pie chart and how to use it properly. In addition to issues stemming from using too many categories, the biggest problem is getting the basic premise: that the pie slices sum up to a meaningful whole.
Information Visualization (InfoVis) is an exciting field to watch grow and expand into ever new areas. Last year brought some interesting developments that point towards changes in how we do and see visualization. What does 2010 hold in store? Here is a look back and some ideas where we're heading.
