When you’re speaking in front of an audience, you’re almost always using a microphone. The point of the microphone is to help your audience hear you. But it can’t do that if you don’t know how to use it or if you actively work against it.
A potpourri isn't usually structured, since it's supposed to be thrown together and mixed. But this one has a section on reports from this year's VIS conference, plus various miscellaneous items like a tool to explore a brain atlas, some history on spreadsheets, and a celebration of Archer, among other things.
The book Only An Ocean Between by Lella Secor Florence contains some of the most iconic ISOTYPE charts. It was published in 1943, as part of a small series called America and Britain.
Danielle Albers Szafir received the Best Paper award for her single-author paper, Modeling Color Difference for Visualization Design at InfoVis this year. She is assistant professor at University of Colorado Boulder and runs the CU VisuaLab there.
Since my (Robert)'s conference reports are almost entirely focused on InfoVis (and a bit of VAST), I have asked Noeska Smit, medical visualization professor and my collaborator in the Vis Potpourri postings, to write about VIS from the SciVis perspective. Everything below are Noeska's words.
I've ignored the major new topic this year so far: machine learning. Another new thing this year, though way overdue, was that we finally started to talk about diversity. And then there were the parties.
Questions of how visualization is read and understood are a common topic in research, and this year was no exception. This part of my IEEE VIS 2017 report covers papers dealing with perceptual issues, the match between visualization and tasks, statistical reasoning, as well as a panel on vision science.
I usually stick to the InfoVis track at VIS, and that was also the case this time. The papers in this part of my report from VIS 2017 cover text, small visualizations like sparklines and glyphs, tools for showing story structure, and multi-device interaction with data.
Part 2 of my IEEE VIS 2017 report covers the keynote and capstone talks at the conference. They were not just at opposite ends of the conference, but also about as different as they can be in terms of content and delivery.
The IEEE VIS 2017 conference took place last week in Phoenix, AZ. I’m slower to write about it than in previous years, but to make up for that I’m not going in chronological order this time, but will break this report up in a more logical manner. This first part covers the opening, which included presentations of the best papers from all three tracks plus a new Test of Time award category.
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.
A potpourri is a collection of spices and plants that create a pleasant aroma together. This new series assembles a list of links to recently interesting things in visualization, from both information visualization (InfoVis, which I normally cover on this site) and scientific visualization (SciVis) – the latter covered by new blog collaborator and medical visualization assistant professor, Noeska Smit.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Let’s talk about plots and joy. The Joy of Plots, if you will. Also, Joy Plots.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is talk about stories having a beginning, middle, and end, but what does that mean for data stories? How do you create the overall structure for those? In a paper to be presented at EuroVis next week, I discuss a simple but very useful structure that I have found "in the wild," and that I believe to be useful and generalizable.
Embellished charts are common in information graphics. But are embellished bar charts actually harder to read than plain ones? In a short paper to be presented at EuroVis next week, Drew Skau and I present a study that looked into this question.
How should you sequence information in a data story so it makes the most sense? Are some sequences better than others? Does time have to move forward or does it not matter? In a paper to be published at EuroVis next week, with Jessica Hullman at UW and my Tableau Research colleague Heidi Lam, we report on a pair of studies that looked into this.
The two main conferences in visualization are VIS and EuroVis, but recently CHI has also gotten some very interesting submissions (CHI is technically a conference about human-computer interaction, or HCI). This year looked particularly strong,
I don't normally do link dumps, but since I'm behind on blogging and have been meaning to link to these things for a while… here are some articles for you to check out. The first set is on what storytelling means with data, the second about an interesting discovery around Charles Minard.
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.
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.
I gave a talk at the University of Washington a few weeks ago. This is an extended version of my BELIV paper An Empire Built on Sand from last year, with more examples and a lot more jokes. You'll learn about various things we know and don't know about visualization, and also whether spinach and carrots actually are good for you.
This is perhaps the oddest book with an ISOTYPE illustration, certainly of the ones I have seen so far. It also contains the most confusing chart produced by the ISOTYPE Institute I am aware of.
Sonification turns data into sound, just like visualization turns data into pictures. Except it's a lot more complicated and limited. Something about sonification has always bugged me, and I think I've finally figured out what: the crowding on the time axis. I've also recently discovered some of the powers of sonification, though.
Visualization techniques encode data into visual shapes and colors. We assume that what the user of a visualization does is decode those values, but things aren’t that simple.
Hans Rosling died earlier today (Tuesday, February 7). He championed the idea of showing people what the world was really like – and how it was different from their preconceptions – using data and visualization. And he did it with enthusiasm and humor. This is a brief appreciation of his work and legacy.
Enrico and Moritz, the two hosts of the only visualization podcast in the known universe, are trying to crowd-fund their work rather than rely on advertising. If we all chip in a few dollars or euros per show, this will be easy to accomplish.
Between Surprise Maps, Dear Data, and election graphics, 2016 was an exciting year. There have also been some gaps, however, notably around storytelling. How far have we come, and where is visualization going?
The first book in the new series on ISOTYPE books is The Vital Flame by Compton Mackenzie, published by The British Gas Council in 1947. It contains 42 color photographs and five ISOTYPE charts, with a nice variety of different topics and styles.
Presenting facts through data is not a recent idea. Otto and Marie Neurath created ISOTYPE in the 1920s and then ran their ISOTYPE Institute for more than two decades. During that time, they created charts for a wide variety of publications. In this series, I will show a number of these charts that I have found, and discuss the context they appeared in.
The Fifth Tapestry conference for storytelling with data is only about six weeks away. To make it easier for academics and students to attend, we are adding a more formal posters program this year.
