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Blog 2019 ​

eagereyesTV: What Is Data? Part 2, Are Images Data? ​

Visualization turns data into images, but are images themselves data? There are often claims that they are, but then you mostly see the images themselves without much additional data. In this video, I look at image browsers, a project classifying selfies along a number of criteria, and the additional information stored in HEIC that makes things like portrait mode and relighting possible. Read more…

ISOTYPE Book: Young, Prager, There’s Work for All ​

This book from 1945 contains a very interesting mix of different charts made by the ISOTYPE Institute, some classic and some quite unusual. As a book about labor and unemployment, it also makes extensive use of Gerd Arntz’s famous unemployed man icon. Read more…

Review: Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie ​

Alberto Cairo’s new book, How Charts Lie, takes readers on a tour of how charts are used and misused, and teaches them how to not be misled. It’s a useful book for both makers and consumers of charts, in the news, business, and pretty much anywhere else. Read more…

eagereyesTV: What is Data? Part 1, File Formats and Intent ​

We all use data all the time, but what exactly is data? How do different programs know what to do with our data? How is visualizing data different from other uses of data? And isn’t everything inside a computer data in the end? Read more…

Prolific, the (Much Better) Mechnical Turk Alternative ​

Prolific is a crowd-sourcing platform for running studies. In contrast to the widely-used Mechanical Turk, it’s specific to studies, has a much better interface, pricing that’s fair to participants, and useful filters to find the right people for your study. Read more…

eagereyesTV Episode 3: 3D Pie Charts For Science! ​

How do we read pie charts? This seems like a straightforward question to answer, but it turns out that most of what you’ve probably heard is wrong. We don’t actually know whether we use angle, area, or arc length. In a short paper at the VIS conference this week I’m presenting a study I ran to answer this question – a study using 3D pie charts! Read more…

Paper: Evidence for Area as the Primary Visual Cue in Pie Charts ​

How we read pie charts is still an open question: is it angle? Is it area? Is it arc length? In a study I'm presenting as a short paper at the IEEE VIS conference in Vancouver next week, I tried to tease the visual cues apart – using modeling and 3D pie charts. Read more…

eagereyesTV Episode 2: Unit Charts, Dot Plots, ISOTYPE, and What Makes Them Special ​

Charts usually show values as visual properties, like the length in a bar chart, the location in a scatterplot, the area in a bubble chart, etc. Unit charts show values as multiples instead. One famous example of these charts is called ISOTYPE, and you may have seen them in information graphics as well. They’re an interesting family of charts and they seem to have some unusual properties that most other charts don’t have. Read more…

XIII ​

This website is now thirteen years old. While it has slowed down somewhat recently, it’s still alive and kicking. Now in its teens, it is looking for new experiences and trying out new things. Read more…

Data: Intent and Primary Interpretation ​

Take a JPEG image file and a CSV file. Which of these two is data? Is one of them more obviously data than the other? I think the key difference is the intent behind the data and its primary interpretation. Read more…

Introducing eagereyesTV, My New YouTube Channel ​

After writing about visualization for over a decade, it’s time to mix things up a bit and try a new medium: video. I just uploaded the first video to my new YouTube channel, which I’m calling eagereyesTV. Take a look and tell me what you think! Read more…

eagereyesTV Episode 1: The DataSaurus, Anscombe’s Quartet, and why summary statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt ​

When dealing with large amounts of data, we often use summary statistics like average, median, standard deviation, sum, etc. They’re useful because they actually hide data, they reduce the amount of information we need to look at to give us a sense of the data. But the same averages and can describe datasets that look vastly different. Read more…

Highlights from EuroVis 2019, Part 2 ​

This is the second part of my highlights from EuroVis earlier this year in Porto, Portugal. There are papers about decision making and interaction, as well as a report on the capstone talk and a look to next year’s conference, which will be a bit different. Read more…

Highlights from EuroVis 2019, Part 1 ​

The EuroVis 2019 conference took place in early June this year in Porto, Portugal. While I enjoyed the city and conference venue, I found the program a bit underwhelming this time around. I’ve kept pushing off writing this report because I found myself griping rather than talking about the content. Read more…

What Is A Misleading Chart? ​

I see a lot of discussions of misleading charts lately, and there are certainly many of them out there. One distinction that isn’t always made, but that I feel is important, is whether the chart itself is poorly designed, or whether an otherwise correct chart is taken to mean something it does not. It’s an important difference that often gets glossed over. Read more…

Visualization for Communication Workshop Deadline Pushed to July 15 ​

You may not be aware that we’re organizing the Visualization for Communication (VisComm) workshop at VIS again this year. That’s why we’ve decided to push back the deadline to July 15, so you can submit all your amazing research papers, position papers, posters, and visual case studies. Read more…

Two Short Papers on Part-to-Whole Charts at EuroVis ​

Why do pie charts look the way they do? What makes this particular way of slicing up a circle the preferred way of showing part-to-whole relationships? In two short papers that I’m presenting this week at EuroVis, I looked at the design space of circular part-to-whole charts, including pie charts. Read more…

Critiquing and Redesigning ​

Criticizing visualizations is a cottage industry of sorts, and an activity I have indulged in in the past as well. Redesigning those charts is also not uncommon, though it's usually other people's charts, and that isn't always welcome. Sarah Leo of The Economist has redesigned some of the charts made by that publication, and not only do her redesigns work better, her thoughts around some of the design issues are also very insightful. Read more…

The TrustVis Workshop at EuroVis ​

I'm one of the organizers of the new TrustVis Workshop at EuroVis this year. We haven't done a good publicizing its existence, so here is a reminder and a deadline extension: submit your papers on trust in visualization until April 5! Read more…

I'm not generally a fan of year-end lists, but they do provide a great way to see many fantastic pieces of work in one place. And if a simple list already does that, what might a list of lists do? Check out Maarten Lambrecht's List of 2018 Visualization Lists to find out! Read more…