I've rebuilt this site, and am in the process of building new features and content. In particular, there's now an interactive version of the ZIPScribble Map. Learn more about how the new site was built, and stay tuned for more.
EagerEyes is 15 years old today! Rather than look back at 15 years of visualization and blogging (though I will do a little of that too), I want to reflect a bit on what blogging means today and where things are going.
This website is now thirteen years old. While it has slowed down somewhat recently, it’s still alive and kicking. Now in its teens, it is looking for new experiences and trying out new things.
So here we are. 10 years. A decade. 3653 days. 452 postings. Some good stuff. Some bad stuff. Some terrible stuff. A decade is a long time. But its end is also just the beginning of the next one.
Have you ever wondered where the weird name comes from, what the site was like before it was a blog, and how it all got started? This posting has all the answers.
Why spend countless hours writing a blog like this? What do I get out of it? What do I hope to accomplish? What is the purpose?
This site has gone through many different looks and designs. I haven't kept count, but I'd be surprised if it was fewer than ten. So far, they have all either been off-the-shelf generic designs or ones I had created myself. For its tenth birthday, I decided to splurge and get eagereyes a complete makeover: a new theme and a real, custom logo.
I have opinions. I state those opinions. Not everybody likes my opinions. And sometimes it's not just a matter of opinion, but also of tone and approach. Criticism can be a useful tool or it can be an angry attack. Figuring out which is which isn't always easy while you're doing it.
Just ahead of the first decade of this website's history clicking over, here's a look back at where things started. Some of those postings were terrible, some of them were quite prescient or are even still popular.
I always mess with my site around the new year, and this year is no exception. In addition to a new theme, I've also been thinking about content. Here are some thoughts on what I want to do in 2015.
What is the purpose of blogging about visualization? Is it to make fun of the bad stuff? Is it to point to pretty things? Is it to explain why things are good or bad? Is it to expand the landscape of ideas and break new ground? Or is it to discuss matters at great length that ultimately don't matter all that much?
Eagereyes.org turned seven years old last week, on October 1st. Seven years is a long time on the web. In dog years, the site is almost fifty years old! Has it lost its edge? Have I gone soft? Where is the bite? Where is the fight?
I was recently asked some questions via email about blogging. Rather than respond via email, I’ve decided to do a Gelman and post my response here.
I have decided to quit my job as Associate Professor at UNC Charlotte and join Tableau Software. Monday (September 17) is my first day of work as a full Tableau employee. Why give up the job security of a tenured university professor for the treacherous prospects of a startup? There are many reasons, but here are the main ones.
I am spending the entire year 2012 in Seattle, working with Tableau Software. The topics I will be working on include storytelling and Tableau Public, plus some super-secret projects even I don't know yet (mostly because we haven't decided on them).
After more than five years, switching the content management system (CMS) on eagereyes was not an easy decision. I've been thinking about doing that for a while though, and I want to explain my reasons and what I expect WordPress to do better than Drupal below. This should also be useful for anybody who is on the fence about starting a blog (or has a blog that hasn't been updated in a while).
Some of the most exciting work in our field is done by up-and-coming doctoral students, post-docs, and junior faculty members. In a new semi-regular series, I will highlight some of the people whose work I find particularly interesting and promising. The goal is to get their names onto people's radars earlier than this would have otherwise happened, in particular for those individuals who don't make a lot of noise about their work.
In dog years, this website is now (almost) as old as I am. Over the years, it has changed both its direction and design several times; there have been times when I was overwhelmed with my readers' reactions and times when nobody seemed to read the stuff I wrote. While I generally hate “best of” postings and indulging in nostalgia, I want to look back at a few of the things that I believe have shaped this site and how I think about what I'm doing, and revisit a few of the more interesting and/or successful things I've managed to do and write over the years.
Today marks the fourth anniversary of this humble little website. I've spent countless hours writing, designing, arguing, and thinking about the things that I publish here. What others may consider a waste of time has helped me tremendously to make new connections, meet new people, refine my thinking, and broaden my horizons. If you're not running a website (or blog), you're really losing out.
Music and visualization are two things that fascinate me. I always felt that they had something in common, and I recently figured out what it was: structure. That may not be the correct musical term, but it should be clear what I mean nonetheless: the rhythmic structure of music, with its repeated patterns and variations, is what makes music. And that is also what makes abstract images interesting to look at, and what we look for in visualization. So I decided to start another website for my musings on music: EagerEars.
This site turns two today. There have been frantic periods of posting and periods of silence. There have been times when I thought nobody would read this and times when I had more than 50,000 visitors in a day. Here is a bit of history, some thoughts on what the site has accomplished, and what I am planning for the future.
Visualization is the visual communication of information - at least the way the term is understood in computer science. But in many ways, visualization is today mostly technical, empirical, and there is practically no theoretical foundation for what we are doing. There are also obvious connections with psychology, design, art, aesthetics, etc. This website tries to pull them all together and start making connections to push visualization to the next level.
