Visualization and Visual Communication
It has never been easier to record your daily activities. The data is all well and good, but the real value comes from visualizing it. Why visualize your mundane, boring life? Because it helps you track what you are doing, and provides motivation to get your ass to the gym.
[Read more…] about The Unrecorded Life is Not Worth Living
There are many terrible charts out there, whether visually ugly and cluttered, or pretty but empty or even misleading (like this beautiful pie chart example featured on Fox News recently). Andrew Vande Moere at infosthetics is hosting a competition to find the ugliest and most useless charts.
[Read more…] about Bring Out Your Dreadful Charts!
Evaluation of visualization systems and techniques is a vital part of visualization research, but is often neglected. While there are established methods for basic perception studies, many other kinds of questions are much more difficult to answer in a controlled study. The CHI workshop BELIV (BEyond time and errors: novel evaLuation methods for Information Visualization) is the place to discuss new ideas about evaluating visualization.
[Read more…] about I Want to BELIV
Getting started with your own blog is so easy today that many people never get to actually doing it. One of the goals of the Putting Visualization on the Web workshop was to get more visualization blogs and websites going. So here are some pointers and a few tips on how to avoid some pitfalls that are especially dangerous for technical people. The goal is not to point to millions of resources, but to narrow down the choices so you can get started writing.
[Read more…] about Starting Your Own Visualization Blog
What good is visualization if it can’t save the world? Or maybe at least change it. Make it a little better. Make a difference. I am organizing a panel at InfoVis next week to discuss what visualization already does, and what else we can do to free visualization from the confines of the ivory tower and have an impact in the real world. Three remarkable people will present their views and discuss with the audience.
Sarah Cohen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who used to work for the Washington Post and now is a professor at Duke University. She has a lot of experience using visualization, though interestingly mostly in analyzing data to find stories, not so much presenting them.
Jérôme Cukier is a data editor with the OECD, who is not only interested in publishing data, but also in getting people to pay attention to it. He wants to reach more people, convince them to analyze what is already out there, and find new and interesting connections.
Martin Wattenberg should be known to people in visualization (hint: he runs the group at IBM that runs Many Eyes). He also has a journalism background, and he sure knows how to get people to pay attention to visualization.
This panel will require audience participation: at least half the session will be available for discussion. So bring your questions, thoughts, and curiosity. And don’t be shy to ask, comment, and criticize!
We will save the world on Wednesday, October 14, at 2pm.
Like last year, I will be live-blogging and tweeting from VisWeek. Here is some information on my plans and links to what others will be doing (that I know of). Feel free to add your links, Twitter handles, etc. in the comments.
[Read more…] about VisWeek Preview: Live Coverage
The workshop Putting Visualization on the Web will be held on Sunday, October 11, from 2pm to 5:30pm at VisWeek 2009. If you are there on Sunday, please join us for discussions on everything related to visualization, blogging, web-based visualization, and a whole lot more. You do not have to register for the workshop separately, and you are welcome whether you submitted a position paper or not.
The program for the workshop is still only preliminary, but check back later this week for more details. We will make the position papers and the results of the discussions available as a report after the workshop. If you want to shape the way the world sees visualization on the World Wide Web, drop by and join the discussion!
A lot of data is tabular in nature, and is efficiently encoded in text files. While such files are easy to produce and read, they bring with them several challenges when used in visualization tools and other programs that have to understand some of the data’s properties. Examples include categorical data, special values in numerical columns (which are common in Census data), and information about the data like its producer. Here is a proposal for a simple data description format that provides that missing information. I call it qnch.
[Read more…] about qnch – A Data Description Language for Tabular Data
We are happy to announce the release of Parallel Sets 2.1. The new version fixes a number of bugs and introduces a few new features. The biggest changes are under hood, with a new database model that can now handle much more complex datasets (in terms of number of dimensions and categories), and the new streaming import can load in datasets with a much larger number of records. We have also added a way to automatically sort categories by name and size, a screenshot function, and more. Upgrading is strongly recommended.
[Read more…] about Parallel Sets 2.1 Released
Last week, I attended the seminar on Turning Statistics into Knowledge, organized by the OECD, the World Bank, and the US Census Bureau. That was an interesting way of spending two days, and I saw some interesting ideas and talked to many great people. But it was also a reminder of how little understanding of visualization there really is, and how far we have to go to make good visualizations available and work for a variety of users.
[Read more…] about OECD Seminar on Turning Statistics into Knowledge