Blog 2021 (12 posts)

New Video: The Science of Pie Charts

The common explanation for how pie charts work is that we read them by angle. That of course would mean that donut charts would be bad, because you can't see the angle when you take away the center of the pie. Changing the radius of a slice wouldn't matter though, because that doesn't change the angle. But there is no evidence that angle is how we read pie charts, quite the opposite actually. In this new video, I walk through five reasons why angle is not how we read pies, and what that means for other things we like to assume about them.

EagerEyes Turns 15

EagerEyes is 15 years old today! Rather than look back at 15 years of visualization and blogging (though I will do a little of that too), I want to reflect a bit on what blogging means today and where things are going.

When the Wrong Chart Is the Right Choice

We all agree that the direction of the bars in a bar chart should correspond to the direction in which the values grow. Or do we? When it comes to running or audio recording and processing, it turns out that the seemingly wrong choice can be the right one – because a more semantically meaningful representation can help us understand and use the data much more easily.

New Video: Linear vs. Quadratic Change

Scaling objects to represent a value is a key part of visualization, but it's not without its pitfalls. Especially when it comes to fancy infographic bar charts, it can easily distort the value's appearance. Why that is, and where else this can happen, isn't always obvious. In my new video, I show how it happens and how to do it right – and how this issue inspired ISOTYPE.

The Dearth of Videos about Visualization

To appropriate the famous Martin Mull quote, writing about visualization is like dancing about architecture. Why are we using written words, like this blog post, to talk about visualization instead of moving images, like in a video?