This blog post accompanies a paper to be presented at EuroVis 2023, “Teru Teru Bōzu: Defensive Raincloud Plots.” For more details, read the paper. It was a dark and stormy night. Visualization people always stress the importance of looking at your data but, I’ll be honest, we would, right? There’s…

This blog post accompanies a paper to be presented at CHI 2023, “Troubling Collaboration: Matters of Care for Visualization Design Study” written by Derya Akbaba, Devin Lange, Michael Correll, Alexander Lex, and Miriah Meyer. For more details, read the paper. Researchers are occasionally asked (or evaluated on) how much they…

Or: How to Manipulate a Time Series if You Don’t Like What it Shows — In recent decades, the world has been getting warmer. This change in climate has and will continue to disrupt how we live our lives, occasionally catastrophically. There is broad scientific consensus that this change is linked to human activity, specifically the release of greenhouse gases, dwarfing the contribution of other…

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate…

I recently (for some pretty elastic definition of “recent,” but I’ve been juggling priorities and this recap got dropped on the floor) attended this year’s installment of IEEE VIS, the premiere conference on information visualization. This was the first hybrid installment after two years of pandemic-induced purely virtual events, with…

You were not born knowing the theory of gravity, yet when somebody tosses a ball you know roughly where to go to try to catch it (or, at the very least, where to look to see where it’s going to land). Likewise, you do not have to totally understand the…

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…