Archive for April, 2013

Stories and Data: An Extraordinary Collaboration

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

I’ve written a great deal over the years about statistical narrative: telling stories with data. I often refer to the messages that we communicate with data as stories and talk about data analysis as the process of finding the stories that dwell in data. I describe one of the primary uses of data visualization as […]

What Can’t Be Built with Bricks?

Monday, April 29th, 2013

In my recent article for the Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter, titled Building Insight with Bricks, I introduced “bricks” as a new way to display quantitative values geospatially (e.g., on a map), which in theory can be read and compared more quickly and precisely than bubbles. Here’s an example: Since the publication of the article last […]

VAST Challenge 2013

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

IEEE’s VisWeek Conference, the premier international conference on visualization, includes a sub-conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST). VAST focuses on fundamental research contributions within visual analytics as well as applications of visual analytics, including applications in science, engineering, medicine, health, media, business, social interaction, and security and investigative analysis. One of the highlights […]

What Makes a Chart Boring?

Monday, April 1st, 2013

In response to my recent blog post about Tableau 8, largely a critique of packed bubble charts and word clouds, Chad Skelton of The Vancouver Sun wrote a rejoinder. In it he essentially endorsed my critique, but also argued that it is sometimes appropriate to use packed bubbles to present data to the general public, […]