Criticism
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…
Review: Jon Schwabish, Better Presentations
Presentations can be dreadful. Badly thought-out slides, boring structure, poorly delivered. I once told a colleague after a practice talk to please shoot me before she’d ever make me sit through such a talk again (to be fair, she had called the talk boring herself before she even began). Read more…
Review: Wainer, Picturing the Uncertain World
Picturing the Uncertain World by Howard Wainer is a book about statistics and statistical thinking, aided by visual depictions of data. Each article in the collection starts by stating a question or phenomenon, which is then investigated further using some clever statistics. Read more…
Review: Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees
Trees. They’re everywhere. And not just in the physical world, but in data visualization and knowledge representation as well. This is not a new phenomenon, it goes back thousands of years. Manuel Lima’s new book, The Book of Trees, gives an overview. Read more…
Review: Isabel Meirelles, Design for Information
When I’m asked for a good book about visualization, I usually try to change the subject. There is no book I really love, they all have their issues. But thanks to Isabel Meirelles, I can now give a straight answer: Design for Information. Read more…
Another Look at Many Eyes, 18 Months Later
In February of last year, I wrote a posting based on some data I had scraped from Many Eyes, and criticizing where I thought it was going (or not going). Here is an update, eighteen months later, of some of the things that have happened in the meantime, and some new data. Read more…
It's Just Too Easy
Once you’ve seen one visualization book, you’ve seen them all. They tend to all look similar, use the same examples, and don’t provide much depth. Is it too easy to write a book when you can use such compelling images? Read more…
Review: Chabris, Simons, The Invisible Gorilla
Inattentional and change blindness are two fascinating phenomena that more people should be aware of. The Invisible Gorilla describes them as well as some other interesting and surprising psychological research. Read more…
Review: Scott Christianson, 100 Diagrams That Changed the World
I recently came across this book that claims to collect the 100 most important diagrams in the history of mankind. It’s a good collection, with many wonderful examples, though it has its flaws. Read more…
Visual Math Gone Wrong
Data visualization is often used to just display data, with little thought put into supporting visual thinking. Giving people tools to do some visual math is a good idea; the visual properties need to be picked carefully however, to make this work. Read more…
The Changing Goals of Data Visualization
The visual representation of data has gone through a number of phases, with its goals switching back and forth between analysis and presentation over time. Many introductions to visualization tend to portray historical examples as all being done for the same purpose. That, I argue in this short, incomplete, and cherry-picked history, is not true. Read more…
Review: Alberto Cairo, The Functional Art
When Alberto Cairo first told me about the book he was writing, called The Functional Art, he warned me that only a small part of it was going to be about visualization. I have no idea what he was talking about, the book I read was a visualization book from start to finish. It is one of the most interesting and insightful books on the topic I have read in a while. Read more…
Edward Tufte's One Day Course: A Review
Last Monday, I got to attend Edward Tufte’s one-day course. I was looking forward to a day of interesting examples, ideas, and discussions, but was disappointed by the amount of rambling and largely historical examples, with little connection to real, current visualization (or presentation) work. Read more…
Cognitive Dissonance on the River Tyne
Moritz Stefaner and Stephan Thiel have created a visualization of sensor data acquired by a floating mill on the river Tyne in Newcastle upon Tyne, Great Britain. Their choice of a flow metaphor for non-flow data creates a cognitive dissonance that makes the visualization difficult to understand. Read more…
Data Display vs. Data Visualization
Gregor Aisch recently wrote a posting about gauges, and how he finds them inspiring and beautiful in their simplicity, even though they are generally disliked in visualization. His posting highlights a common misconception about visualization, and a conflation of different uses of data display, that is worth exploring. Read more…
A Criticism of Visualization Criticism Criticism
Criticism in visualization can be harsh, pedantic, and stupid. But it is also a useful tool that shows the thinking behind the seemingly simple graphical shapes we use, and teaches people things they might not be aware of. While I largely agree with Andy Kirk's criticism of visualization criticism and the danger of scaring people away from visualization, his "grown-up criticism" argument cuts both ways: grown-ups can argue a point without getting upset. Read more…
Quo Vadis, Many Eyes?
Remember when visualization for the masses was all the rage, back in 2007? We were so young and hopeful. Many Eyes and Swivel were the harbingers of a new age of data literacy and well-informed debate. Visualization was going to be social and change the world. Alas, it was not to last. Swivel is gone, and Many Eyes clearly seen its best days. This is despite the fact that interest in visualization is growing, and it turns out that Many Eyes is as busy now as never before. I have scraped some data from the site that shows that despite the lack of updates and new features, people's use of it is still increasing. The data also gives some interesting insights into what people use it for. Read more…
Another Metaphor for Visualization: Writing
Andrew Gelman recently wrote a blog posting in which he draws an interesting comparison between writing styles and graphics styles. I think he's on to something, and the comparison can be taken a bit further to illustrate some common misunderstandings around visualization. Read more…
My Review of Visualize This and Visual Complexity for Science Magazine
I was asked to write a review of two recent visualization books for Science: Nathan Yau's Visualize This and Manuel Lima's Visual Complexity. The piece appeared in the last issue of 2011, right before Christmas. Below is a link and some additional comments on the review and the two books. Read more…
Above All, Do No Harm!
Heatmaps and 3D pie charts are often criticized, and for good reason. But they're not always a bad choice, and can work for simple data presentation. Context is important when criticizing visualizations, especially when there are no obvious improvements that can be made. Read more…
In Defense of Pie Charts
Pie charts don't get much respect. They're almost always considered the wrong choice by those supposedly in the know. But how do we know that this is true? What evidence do we have to support this? The truth is, not much. And when we start digging for proof, it turns out that pie charts are much better than we want to admit. Read more…
One Chart To Rule Them All
Finding the right chart for complex data is not an easy task. A reader pointed me to a presentation (PDF) by the New Hampshire Department of Education that illustrates some of the thinking behind choosing a new visual representation. The tool of choice here is the bubble chart. Read more…
Anscombe's Quartet
Visualization may not be as precise as statistics, but it provides a unique view onto data that can make it much easier to discover interesting structures than numerical methods. Visualization also provides the context necessary to make better choices and to be more careful when fitting models. Anscombe's Quartet is a case in point, showing that four datasets that have identical statistical properties can indeed be very different. Read more…
Tufte and the Truth about the Challenger
Almost exactly 25 years ago, on January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated seconds after lift-off. One of Edward Tufte's most famous examples of bad charts are the ones used by engineers who argued against the launch, and who failed to convince. It's a fascinating story, but it has one major fault: it is not true. Read more…
Review: Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
John Snow's map of the cholera dead after London's 1854 epidemic is often heralded as one of the earliest examples of graphical data analysis. Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map gives a lot of background about the London of the 1850s, Snow's work, and how central the map really was. Read more…
Swivel, Part 2: Solving A Single Problem
After my interview with Swivel founders Brian Mulloy and Dmitry Dimov on what happened to Swivel.com, I felt there were still many open questions. So I reached out to Halsey Minor, whose (cleverly-named) incubator Minor Ventures had funded Swivel, and who had made the decision to pull the plug. In this interview, he talks about his issues with Swivel, his priorities in developing products, and what it would take to bring Swivel back. Read more…
The Rise and Fall of Swivel.com
Earlier this summer, the visualization website Swivel.com disappeared from the internet. To find out what happened, I tracked down and interviewed Swivel's two founders, Brian Mulloy and Dmitry Dimov. Read more…
Review: Kaiser Fung, Numbers Rule Your World
You all know what statistics is, right? I mean, everybody knows. But if you had to explain why it's useful, and what it's useful for, would you have an answer? Do you know how statistics makes a difference in all our lives, all the time? Even if you (think you) do, check out Kaiser Fung's book, Numbers Rule Your World. Read more…
Review: Cornelia Dean, Am I Making Myself Clear?
The first episode of season 4 of Mad Men opens with Don Draper being interviewed by a journalist. He doesn't tell him anything that's of interest and then dodges the question Who is Don Draper? by claiming that he was taught as a child not to talk about himself. Scientists do an equally terrible job at communication, and for many of the same reasons. Cornelia Dean's book Am I Making Myself Clear? offers fascinating insights into both journalism and science, and provides concrete ideas for how to do better. Read more…
The Fascinating World of (Good) Infographics
Information graphics (infographics) have gotten a bad rep lately because of a sudden wave of badly designed, uninformative graphics. But when they are done right, infographics can be both highly informative and enjoyable to look at and discover. Here are a few recent examples to demonstrate that. Read more…
Visualization Can Never Be Art
Is visualization art? Are video games art? Is programming art? Is art art? You can discuss these questions at length, but without concrete criteria, they end up being academic exercises rather than leading to some kind of conclusion. One criterion, which I believe to be suited especially well for visualization, is the sublime. Art is sublime, visualization is not. Hence, visualization is not art. Read more…
Chart Junk Considered Useful After All
There is almost universal agreement that any extraneous elements in a chart or visualization, elements that do not represent numbers, are detrimental to understanding the data. A paper that was presented at CHI recently described a study to figure out just how bad all this chart junk really was. As it turns out, it's actually rather helpful. Read more…
The Visualization Cargo Cult
Visualization is not a very clearly defined field. There are many variations, ways of doing it, and ideas around it. That is valuable, because it keeps the field moving and brings in fresh ideas. But it also brings with it people who like using visualization's tools and talk about visualization, but what they are doing is something else. We need to start calling these things what they are: a cargo cult of visualization. Read more…
March Chart Madness
Terrible charts seem to be in season. Rarely have I come across so many incredibly bad charts in such a short time: information graphics that don't actually depict data, distorted representations, useless color schemes, and the worst pie chart ever. Read more…
Data Visualization: Should We Divide It?
For some time now there has been some discussion about finding a new terminology for the Data Visualization field. The intention is to find names that reflects the two main different directions that are seen today on Dataviz: visual data analysis and data driven aesthetics images. The concern is that Data Visualization might lose its ‘serious’ role as an analytic tool by including works that, without doubt, praise aesthetics before clarity. Read more…
Curing A Sick Chart
I recently criticized Ben Fry's visualization of health care cost data from GE and claimed that I knew how to do it better. While my analysis may not be as pretty and flashy as Fry's, it provides actual insight into the data. It also reveals an interesting issue: the data is really dull. So dull, in fact, that a visualization was needed to cover up that fact. Read more…
The Cost of a Sick Chart
General Electric recently commissioned Ben Fry and Seed Media to visualize health data to communicate the costs of different kinds of diseases to the public. The result is pretty and colorful, but of little value if you actually want to learn something. Read more…
Shaking the "Pretty Picture" Stigma
Coming from the academic and computer science side of visualization, I always assumed that it would be self-evident to anybody that visualization is first and foremost useful, and only happens to also produce nice pictures. Alas, this is not actually the case. To most people, visualization means pretty pictures first, and maybe also a fact or two. We have to fight that or risk the trivialization and marginalization of visualization as an analytic tool. Read more…
SPSS Viz Designer
SPSS recently released their new Viz Designer, a visualization engine built on Leland Wilkinson's work (The Grammar of Graphics and nViZn). The comparison with Tableau is unavoidable since both are based on the same underlying ideas. Right now, Viz Designer does not look good in that comparison. Read more…
What is Visualization? A Definition
What is a visualization? The word is problematic, and there have been very few definitions that try to define this field we are working in. More importantly: what is not a visualization? It is easy to argue that anything visual is a visualization in some way – but does that mean anything? Here is a definition of visualization and a few examples to illustrate the different criteria. Read more…
Book Review: Visual Thinking for Design, by Colin Ware
Colin Ware's latest book Visual Thinking for Design has a promising subtitle: active vision, attention, visual queries, gist, visual skills, color, narrative, design. That's covering quite a bit of ground, and also a lot of things not usually considered in visualization. While this is a book about design, I was interested in what it could teach people in InfoVis, and I review it from that point of view. Read more…
A Tale of Two Types of Visualization and Much Confusion
The term visualization is used to mean different things in different contexts, and even visualization that is based on data can be done for different reasons and with different goals. Mixing up these different types of visualization leads to misunderstandings and confusion. Here is an attempt at teasing apart the two major types of data-based visualization, and understanding the differences. Read more…
Autism Diagnosis Accuracy - Visualization Redesign
Kaiser at Junk Charts has posted an interesting challenge based on the question how to visualize an Autism diagnosis dataset in a better way (originally posted by Igor Carron at Nuit Blanche). I'm offering my own redesign of the data below, and discuss my different approach and what it tells us about the visualization of sets in general. Read more…
The Science of Information Visualization: A Sketch
According to one definition(ref), engineering is making things based on scientific principles – as opposed to the intuitive making that defines a craft. Information visualization (InfoVis) is practiced like a craft today, based mostly on practical examples, but not on theoretical basics. Here is a sketch of not only InfoVis as an engineering field, but InfoVis as a science. Read more…
The Joy of Representation
When peanuts are bombs, clown-shaped cake ornaments are muzzle fires, and young guys are skateboards, we are talking about representation. We take it for granted that words can refer to things or abstract concepts, and colored spots on a piece of paper can depict data. Representation is really quite remarkable, and a better understanding of it will make a big difference in how we build visualizations. Read more…
A Critique of Chernoff Faces
Chernoff Faces are discussed in every information visualization course, and are referenced in many papers that talk about glyphs. Yet the only serious use of faces in visualization is for calibration, not for data display. Faces are so special that we better know their perceptual properties really well before we can use them, which we don't. Read more…
Review: Swivel vs. Many Eyes
Social websites are all the rage right now, and are not just hyped by the media (MySpace and YouTube in particular), but there are also large amounts of money involved (again, MySpace and YouTube). But does the social model make sense for data analysis and visualization? And will users play and interact with data the way they do with other media? Two websites were launched recently to find out: Swivel.com (defunct as of late 2010) and Many Eyes. Here is a first review, looking at the two sites in terms of their founders, approach, social aspects, technology, capabilities, broad appeal, and ethics. Read more…
The Loneliness of the Visualization Critic
At a panel discussion at Vis 2006, we were blasted for raising the question, Is there Science in Visualization? A senior visualization researcher said that he was embarrassed that this question was being discussed, and that we were trying to push our way of doing things on the community. The panel was still a success, but this proved just how far we still have to go. Read more…
When Informative Art Isn't
Making visualization more aesthetically pleasing is certainly an important goal. Another one is to make visualization a part of our everyday lives. Ambient information displays are a way of doing both, and they are often inspired by pieces of art. But what if the viewers think they are just looking at a picture, and don't realize that it presents information to them? Read more…
Visualization Criticism - A New Way of Thinking about Visualization
The main means of communication in science is the (printed) journal article or conference paper, which only contains text and static images. This limits the way we can illustrate change, interaction, and dynamics. We do not have the appropriate language to effectively describe our work not only in terms of what it shows, but how and why it works. We also lack a means of talking about our own and others' work in ways that critically reflect on what has been done. We need to learn from art criticism, where this is all possible. Read more…
Opining or Murmuring: Infographics vs. Visualization
Commenting on a diagram showing the flow of electricity from its production to its use (and waste), the author of the Junk Charts blog writes: As it stands, this chart murmurs but does not opine. Which is exactly what it should do. Read more…
She Blinded Me with Eye Candy
The winner of the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge (organized by Science and the National Science Foundation, NSF) shows "five well-known mathematical surfaces, rendered as glass objects in a highly realistic 'Still Life.'" Using reflection, colored lighting, and otherwise unstructured sufaces makes for an image that does not convey the actual shapes particularly well. But it sure is pretty. Read more…