EagerEyes.org
The Sad State of the InfoVis Contest
In some fields, contests drive research and the entire field forward. Those contests are prestigious, and people list the fact that they won the contest in their CVs. In InfoVis, the contest is trying to appeal to researchers, but is getting little attention. What should the role of the contest be? And how can we make it more interesting?
Presidential Demographics as Open-Source, More to Come
The EagerEyes Labs' mission is to provide tools to gain insight into relevant data to everybody. As part of that, the plan has always been to release the source code. The first piece of code is now published, and more is coming.
Presidential Demographics, Part II
Would McCain be the oldest US President? Would Obama be the youngest? Who was the youngest president? Were presidents younger in the past or older? What is the highest number of years a former president lived after leaving office? Who served the longest? Whose term was the shortest? The interactive visualization below lets you answer these and a few other questions.
Sightings: Symmetric Bat Flight
How do bats fly? What are the aerodynamic conditions around their wings? And how do you visualize all that? I did a short interview with David Laidlaw (PDF), who has collaborated with physicists, biologists, fluid mechanics experts, and others, to create a poster that won last year's NSF Visualization Challenge. The interview was done for American Scientist's Sightings column, which I have been invited to write.
List of Influences: Jock Mackinlay
Jock D. Mackinlay was working on information visualization long before the field or the term even existed. His Ph.D. thesis on the automatic visual representation of data translated Bertin's semiological texts into a useful piece of software (and badly-needed visualization theory). His work also includes Cone Trees, the Perspective Wall, an analysis of the visualization design space, as well as the Readings in Information Visualization (together with Stuart Card and Ben Shneiderman). Mackinlay worked at PARC from 1986 to 2004, when he joined Tableau Software – a company based on a Ph.D. thesis inspired by his work 15 years earlier.
What is Visualization? A Definition
What is a visualization? The word is problematic, and there have been very few definitions that try to define this field we are working in. More importantly: what is not a visualization? It is easy to argue that anything visual is a visualization in some way – but does that mean anything? Here is a definition of visualization and a few examples to illustrate the different criteria.
The Visual Display of Relevant Information
When Al Gore talks about global warming, Hans Rosling shows the relationship between health and wealth, and the New York Times visualizes primary results and American consumer debt, they communicate visually. But they only use visual representation to get their point across, as a means to an end. When we want to show why visualization is effective, we have to care about the message, too – not just the method.
The YouTube Screening Room
I'm not generally a big YouTube fan. Sure, I've watched all the funny cat movies and seen people dump Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke. But little else has made me go there in some months. This has changed, though, with a new feature of the website: The YouTube Screen Room. Twice a month, four independent short films are added to the site, and the quality is amazing.
New CMS, Users, More Coming
This website just got a facelift and a few new features. I transitioned it to Drupal 6, and in the process redid the theme from scratch. While the changes are not huge, it does look a bit more modern. There are also a few new features to facilitate commenting and discussion.
Book Review: Visual Thinking for Design, by Colin Ware
Colin Ware's latest book Visual Thinking for Design has a promising subtitle: active vision, attention, visual queries, gist, visual skills, color, narrative, design. That's covering quite a bit of ground, and also a lot of things not usually considered in visualization. While this is a book about design, I was interested in what it could teach people in InfoVis, and I review it from that point of view.
