I recently finished reading a wonderful book by Steven Johnson entitled The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. In the summer of 1854 cholera swept through a section of London with unprecedented intensity. At the time, the cause of cholera was […]

Would you buy a pair of glasses with lenses that were so scratched up you couldn’t see through them, even if the frames looked cool? Not if you want to get from point A to point B without injury. So why would you ever buy charting software that transforms simple information into a completely unreadable […]

I have sometimes been amused during my attendance at high-level business meetings in American industry, amused at the discrepancy between the way we are told that important decisions get made and the truth. (Donald A. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine, 1993, Basic Books, New York) […]

In addition to this blog, Perceptual Edge provides a Discussion Forum for people to exchange and discuss ideas regarding data visualization. It tends to be a place where specialists in visual data analysis and presentation congregate, but from time to time the ideas that are shared cry out for a broader audience. A few days […]