Kaiser Fung doesn’t like this graphic that accompanied a recent story about the bird flu in the Wall Street Journal. His redesign shows a lot less overlap and a lot more detail; so much, in fact, that it obscures the point of the chart. Here is the offending graphic. The overlapping circles are hard to read with … Continue reading When Details Hide the Story
My colleagues at Tableau Research have three papers at InfoVis next week. They cover guided data exploration, color theory, and data partitioning. Here’s a little preview. Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations This is a collaboration between Anushka Anand and Jock Mackinlay at Tableau and some of Jeff Heer’s group at the University … Continue reading Tableau Papers at IEEE VIS 2015
Tableau today released a new visualization tool for iPad, called Vizable. This is a completely new app built specifically for exploring data using touch. It is based on a new approach to visual analysis that focuses on the data and task, rather than providing a chart toolbox. Vizable is built on the idea of data worlds, which depend on … Continue reading Vizable, data worlds for iPad
Wrangling data into a shape that can be used to create visualizations is a huge problem with few available tools. Trifacta Wrangler is a powerful new tool that is free to use. Data comes in all shapes and sizes, and those are often not conducive to working with it right away. Date formats might be … Continue reading Trifacta Wrangler for cleaning and reshaping data
I will organize runs again at IEEE VIS in Chicago two weeks from now. As with previous years, organization will be minimal: just show up ready to run. I will prepare routes in the 3-6mi (5-10km) range. If you want to know what being organized looks like, check out the Velo Club de VIS: they have a website, a … Continue reading VIS Running Club 2015
The U.S. Department of Education just released an amazing dataset about the costs of going to college, earnings potential, etc. They’re doing so many things right, it’s really great. But what is still lacking is the metadata, making analysis harder than it needs to be. I haven’t even looked through all the data, but it looks very … Continue reading Why Is Metadata So Hard?
When creating charts, it’s important to pick the one that actually fits not just the data, but the task. That can require going outside your comfort zone to use something beyond the four or five most common chart types. Here is an example where the original chart does not support comparison between two different sets of numbers, … Continue reading The Point Of A Chart
I attended EuroVis 2015 last week in Cagliari, Sardinia. This is the second-most important conference in the academic visualization world, and there were plenty of good sessions to choose from (full and short papers, state-of-the-art reports, and industry sessions). As usual, this is a highly subjective and incomplete report. I did not see anywhere near all … Continue reading Report: EuroVis 2015
I’m organizing a very informal running club at EuroVis next week. If you’re attending the conference, don’t forget to bring your running shoes and leave your excuses at home. This is even less organized than than the VIS running club. I’m not going to have you fill out a form. Instead, just drop me an … Continue reading EuroVis Running Club
Feedback loops are a common concept in engineering. When it comes to giving talks, academics would do well to apply some of the thinking behind them to improve their output by observing how it deviates from the desired one, and making changes to adjust it. I’ve been to a number of conferences lately that had a … Continue reading Feedback Loops for Better Talks
