In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s (you, know the Le Petit Prince guy) 1931 novella Vol de Nuit (Night Flight), Rivière, the station chief of an airmail operation in South America, intentionally sends men and machines on (at the time) extremely perilous night flights up and down the Andes and in all…

This blog post accompanies a paper to be presented at CHI 2022, “Recommendations for Visualization Recommendations: Exploring Preferences and Priorities in Public Health” written by Calvin Bao, Siyao Li, Sarah Flores, Michael Correll, and Leilani Battle. For more details, read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01335! The pitch is pretty simple: you want…

It’s been a while since I’ve really been able to troll to my heart’s content, so here are some things in information visualization that I suspect are either a) bad, b) useless, or, at the very least, c) not nearly as useful as people tout them to be. I will…

There is a concept in evolutionary biology called carcinization, where groups of totally unrelated decapods will, through the process of convergent evolution, will end up looking like crabs. My understanding of the process (and I should note that “my understanding” of evolutionary biology does not carry me very far in…

Whatever you do, you’re not going to have complete freedom — you’ll be muzzled in one way or another, but at least you can have some diversity in how you’re muzzled. —Timnit Gebru The title of this post should give you an idea of the base level of cynicism with…

I am trying to space this particular collection of pet peeves out far enough away from any of my usual paper deadlines so I can make it at clear as possible that I am not subtweeting (subblogging?) anybody. …

This blog post accompanies a paper to be presented at IEEE VIS 2021, “Untidy Data: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Tables,” written by Lyn Bartram, Michael Correll, and Melanie Tory. For more details, read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15005! The constant refrain from data scientists and other people who work with data is…

This post functions as a personal brain dump about academic conferences as a format after a decade or so of regular in-person conference attendance followed by a year and a half of remote virtual conferences. I’m timing this brain dump both because of some related musings by people smarter than…

My mother worked for the local historical society while I was growing up, so I spent a lot of time in the 1815 historic house that was the group’s headquarters and main touring location. Docents would wear their period-appropriate hoop skirts and take people through the parlor and the master…