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Blog 2018

New Vis Research Blog: Multiple Views

While activity on this site has been a bit slow this year, I’ve helped start a new group blog focused on visualization research, called Multiple Views. Read more…

Tapestry 2018 Program, Call for Demos

The Tapestry 2018 program is complete, including the three keynotes and eight newly-added short stories. We are now looking for proposals for demos and will send out a call for PechaKucha-style talks to attendees soon, too. Read more…

IEEE VIS 2018, Part 3: New Approaches, Meet the Founders, Perception and Cognition

The final report from VIS 2018 (see previously here and here) again covers papers, papers, and more papers. There are new ways to specify visualizations, a panel, perception research, as well as new work on how to deal with uncertainty in data. Read more…

IEEE VIS 2018, Part 2: Time, Evaluation, Dashboards, The Future of VIS

While the first part of this report covered mostly workshops and other events, it's all papers from now on. Plus a session on the future of the VIS conference. Read more…

IEEE VIS 2018, Part 1: VisComm, VisInPractice, BELIV, Best Papers

The IEEE VIS conference is the most important outlet for academic research. This year's conference took place in Berlin, Germany. Here is a report on some of the most interesting (to me, anyway) papers, events, and developments, in three parts. Read more…

Paper: Skipping the Replication Crisis in Visualization

Visualization doesn't have the replication issues that some other fields are struggling with right now, but is that because our science is so strong or because nobody actually bothers with replications? And what can we do to get ahead of potential problems before we run into a full-on crisis? In a paper to be presented at BELIV, Steve Haroz and I list potential pitfalls and present possible solutions. Read more…

Tapestry 2018, Details and Keynote Speakers

We recently announced the speakers for Tapestry 2018, which takes place November 29 and 30 at the University of Miami. It will again be focused on telling stories with data, but we're also making a few changes. Read more…

EuroVis 2018, Wednesday through Friday

EuroVis raged on through the end of the week with talks, posters, and lots of food. This second part covers papers about visualization evaluation, high-dimensional structures, graph layouts, etc., as well as the capstone and closing (with information about next year). Read more…

EuroVis 2018, Monday and Tuesday

EuroVis 2018 in Brno, Czechia, is in full swing. The first two days included workshops, the opening with a very fun and interesting keynote, and some good papers. Read more…

VisComm Workshop at VIS and Tapestry 2018

If you're into visualization for communication and storytelling, these two events should be on your radar: the Visualization for Communication Workshop (VisComm) at VIS and Tapestry 2018. Read more…

Portrait: Jason Dykes

Jason Dykes is professor at City University London, where he also co-leads the giCentre. He straddles the line between cartography and visualization, publishing in both communities and combining ideas from both – which have led to crossover ideas like spatially-ordered treemaps and map lineups. Read more…

Visualization: Three Alternate Histories

The academic visualization community largely comes from computer science: most of the professors teach in computer science (or similar) departments, most of the students doing research are computer science students of some flavor or other. It's interesting to consider how the field might be different if visualization had emerged from a different discipline. Read more…

Seven Visualization Talks That Terrified Me At CHI

I recently attended CHI 2018 in Montréal, QC. Normally conferences leave me excited for the next idea or the next direction (and also physically exhausted). This was one of the first where I was left feeling terrified: a lot of the work did an excellent job of highlighting core problems about our assumptions as visualization researchers, and poked at big intractable issues that I had mostly been ignoring for a long time. Here are the seven most terrifying talks. Read more…

How to Get Excited About Standard Datasets

It can be hard to get excited about the standard datasets that we keep using to show how visualization and statistics work. But if that's the case for you, it's not the datasets's fault, it's you! Here’s how to keep that spark going! Read more…

Visualization Potpourri, March 2018

Time to wake up from the eagereyes winter hibernation with an aromatic potpourri! This time, we have news about pies, stippling, colors, sorting algorithms, and a few more. Also a video of my collaborator Noeska singing the praises of medical visualization. Read more…

EuroRVVV Call For Papers!

I'm delighted to be one of the co-chairs of the workshop on reproducibility, verification, and validation in visualization (EuroRVVV – quite possibly the worst-acronymed workshop in visualization) at EuroVis. The topic this year is uncertainty, and we're looking for all kinds of contributions to this important topic. Read more…

A Smart Take on Election Maps

When maps are used to display data, there is often a discrepancy between the data being shown, which almost never relates to area, and the area of the different parts of the map. This is particularly common in election maps. This new map of votes in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election cleverly combines geography and data in a clear and compelling way. Read more…