This chart is a staple in every visualization course and many visualization talks. But what does it show, and what does it leave out? There’s a lot more to Napoleon’s Russian Campaign and to Charles Minard’s work than this one chart. My new video looks beyond the surface of what is perhaps the most famous chart out there.
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Video Series: Counting In 2021 with Mechanical Calculators
Mechanical calculators are fascinating. I may have gone down a few rabbit holes on this topic earlier this year, and acquired a few. As a little celebration of the end of this year, and to start the new one, I’m creating a small series of videos about them and releasing one each week.
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eagereyesTV: Chart Appreciation, What’s Really Warming the World
Line charts – they’re not the most glamorous. And yet, they can be used to tell a compelling story about global warming. In this video, I talk about what I consider a modern classic of data journalism, What’s Really Warming the World by Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi: how it works, how it’s structured, and why it works so well.
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eagereyesTV: Index Charts, Part 2: Chopping Up and Folding the Time Axis
I covered the more commonly known value index charts in my my last video on index charts, this one is about indexing on the horizontal, or time, axis. It’s kind of fascinating how you can fold the time axis to get a better view of your data. I show how it works and walk through a number of examples, using housing prices, camera sales, global warming, and even data about my running!
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eagereyesTV: Index Charts, Part 1: Making Time Series Data Comparable
To show change over time, you typically use a line chart. But when you’re comparing time series whose values are very different, the differences between the lines can obscure the changes within them. Index charts can help with that. They align values to a reference, or fold the time axis on itself, or even do both.
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New eagereyesTV Video and Series: Chart Appreciation
Time to breathe new life into my little YouTube channel, which I’m calling eagereyesTV. I’m doing so with the start of a new series I’m calling Chart Appreciation. Each episode will be on one particular visualization, news piece, or interactive. As the first one, I picked Hannah Fairfield’s Driving Safety, in Fits and Starts from 2012.
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eagereyesTV: What Is Data? Part 2, Are Images Data?
Visualization turns data into images, but are images themselves data? There are often claims that they are, but then you mostly see the images themselves without much additional data. In this video, I look at image browsers, a project classifying selfies along a number of criteria, and the additional information stored in HEIC that makes things like portrait mode and relighting possible.
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eagereyesTV: What is Data? Part 1, File Formats and Intent
We all use data all the time, but what exactly is data? How do different programs know what to do with our data? How is visualizing data different from other uses of data? And isn’t everything inside a computer data in the end?
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eagereyesTV Episode 3: 3D Pie Charts For Science!
How do we read pie charts? This seems like a straightforward question to answer, but it turns out that most of what you’ve probably heard is wrong. We don’t actually know whether we use angle, area, or arc length. In a short paper at the VIS conference this week I’m presenting a study I ran to answer this question – a study using 3D pie charts!
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eagereyesTV Episode 2: Unit Charts, Dot Plots, ISOTYPE, and What Makes Them Special
Charts usually show values as visual properties, like the length in a bar chart, the location in a scatterplot, the area in a bubble chart, etc. Unit charts show values as multiples instead. One famous example of these charts is called ISOTYPE, and you may have seen them in information graphics as well. They’re an interesting family of charts and they seem to have some unusual properties that most other charts don’t have.
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