Blog 2022
Site Changes Coming, How to Follow Sites, and Where I've Been
This site has been around for over 16 years now, and a lot has changed in the world during that time. I'm currently working on an overhaul and wanted to give everybody an idea of what I'm thinking about and why there has been little activity. In light of recent developments, here are also some good ways to follow good old-fashioned blogs and an alternative to Twitter. Read more…
Midjourney is a Trip
Of the several AI-powered systems that can create images from text prompts, MidJourney is the most easily accessible one right now. I've had some fun playing with it. Read more…
New video: Gauges for Data Visualization, The NY Times Election Needle, and Circular Bar Charts
Gauges aren't very popular in visualization, but they have some interesting properties. There is, of course, the infamous NY Times "election needle," but you're probably using gauges every day without giving them too much thought. There's also an interesting connection with circular bar charts, which I think can work well when used as part-to-whole charts. I talk about all of this in my new video. Read more…
Watch My Outlier Talk: This Should Have Been A Bar Chart!
I gave a talk at the Outlier conference earlier this year, with the somewhat elaborate title, The Joys – and Dangers – of Bespoke and Unusual Chart Types. Though I eventually decided to go with the much shorter, This Should Have Been A Bar Chart! You can watch it on YouTube now. Read more…
Paper: More Than Meets the Eye: A Closer Look at Encodings in Visualization
Encodings play a central role in visualization, but I believe our thinking about them is too simplistic. In a new paper, I argue that we need to distinguish between the encodings that specify how a visualization is drawn and the ones that are readable or actually read by an observer. While they largely or entirely overlap in some charts (like bar charts or scatterplots) they don't in others (pie charts, line charts, etc.). And what exactly do you even specify in more complex visualizations like treemaps? Read more…
The (Possible) Stratagem Behind the Biden Bar
A bar chart with a distorted vertical axis isn't very unusual. But what if that chart was posted by the White House and what if it was done on purpose – not to overstate the number shown, but rather to evoke a particular kind of response? Read more…
The NY Times COVID Spiral Is Off-Center
An opinion piece in the New York Times last week got a lot of attention in visualization circles for its use of a spiral chart as its opener. While the choice of chart and color scheme can be debated, I want to discuss the fact that the spiral is disconcertingly off-center. Read more…