Showing when and where natural disasters like hurricanes are going to cause damage is not just a question of aesthetics – it is literally a matter of life and death. The traditional way hurricane forecasts are shown has a number of problems, but are the alternatives actually better? [Read more...] about Communicating Uncertainty When Lives Are on the Line
Blog 2017
The Importance of Context
I use a Misfit activity tracker to count my steps. The Misfit app does a decent job of showing me step counts per day and every month, misfit also sends me a summary of the previous month’s activity. Unfortunately, the numbers in that summary are presented without any context, making that summary almost entirely useless. [Read more...] about The Importance of Context
Joy Plots
Let’s talk about plots and joy. The Joy of Plots, if you will. Also, Joy Plots. [Read more...] about Joy Plots
Building Bridges Between Insular InfoVis Papers
Can you describe what information visualization research does in a few words? What are the driving questions and problems right now? It’s harder than it might seem. I believe that the lack of cohesion in the field is due, at least in part, to how we publish research. [Read more...] about Building Bridges Between Insular InfoVis Papers
EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 3
Thursday and Friday at EuroVis brought a few papers on storytelling, a new toolkit for running online studies, a better way to put your list of publications online, and a lot more. [Read more...] about EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 3
EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 2
On the first full day of the main EuroVis conference, we learned that estimating correlation from scatterplots may not be as great as we thought, saw a number of new ways to show what is and is not in the data, and got some new tools for making browser-based visualization fast. [Read more...] about EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 2
EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 1
EuroVis is currently taking place in Barcelona. In the interest of shorter postings, I’m breaking this report up into three parts. This first part covers the EuroRVVV workshop as well as the opening session and keynote. [Read more...] about EuroVis 2017 Conference Report, Part 1
InfoVis Papers at CHI 2017
The two main conferences in visualization are VIS and EuroVis, but recently CHI has also gotten some very interesting submissions (CHI is technically a conference about human-computer interaction, or HCI). This year looked particularly strong, [Read more...] about InfoVis Papers at CHI 2017
Averages Are Metadata
When we think of metadata, we tend to think of attributes that describe the data. Where do the numbers come from? What do the values in a categorical column mean? Etc. But there is a type of metadata we rarely even recognize as such: values computed from the data. They're often treated as part of the data, but that's a mistake. [Read more...] about Averages Are Metadata
Huge Percentages Are Meaningless
Percentages are incredibly useful when talking about how something is a part of something larger: this many percent tax, that many percent of people are unemployed, etc. When percentages are much larger than 100, however, they lose their meaning and their usefulness. Unfortunately, they seem to be increasingly common. [Read more...] about Huge Percentages Are Meaningless