A new Annals of Internal Medicine article describes a study that compares two employer-sponsored financial incentive programs for promoting weight loss among obese employees. I first read about the article at the Pacific Standard. The study design is a randomized controlled prospective trial. The two programs are as follows: Program 1. Obese employees are given [...]
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. To get the main issue out of the way: the title is misleading. The selection in the book is not based on the quality of the diagrams, but rather of the invention or cultural shift they are…
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. The following example is from the Census Data Visualization Gallery. Like many of the other visualizations there, it shows some good thinking but ultimately fails to do what…
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. Early to Mid–1800s: Playfair, Nightingale, Snow, Minard The first uses of graphics to represent data,…
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…
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. The Setting The course took place in the large ballroom of the Westin Seattle, which was set up for around 500–600 people. Maybe it was…
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. The mill itself generates power, and there are sensors that measure a few properties of the water flowing through it: oxygen level, acidity,…
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. Gregor takes issue with the notion that visualization requires a certain number of data points to be displayed. He also considers “breaking…
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…
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…
