Information Design & Data Visualization
No more LittleDataGraphics
Small data sets should be shown directly...LittleDataGraphics (pie charts, bar charts) translate and encode data into areas and colors. Viewers must then mentally translate codes back into numbers. These codes are unique to the local sets of data graphics, and do not repay learning. Instead, just directly show numbers as numbers. No more LittleDataGraphics. Data visualizations are at their best when there is so much data that the only way to see it...is to see it.
The Visual Information Seeking Mantra
There are many visual design guidelines but the basic principle might be summarized as the Visual Information Seeking Mantra:
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demandEach line represents one project in which I found myself rediscovering this principle and therefore wrote it down it as a reminder. It proved to be only a starting point in trying to characterize the multiple information visualization innovations occurring at university, government, and industry research labs.
Envisioning Information
A Book by Edward TufteBeautiful Evidence
A Book by Edward TufteThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information
A Book by Edward TufteThe Elements of Graphing Data
A Book by William S. ClevelandVision Science
A Book by Stephen E. PalmerVisual Explanations
A Book by Edward TufteVisualizing Algorithms
An Article by Mike BostockInformation Visualization: Perception for Design
A Book by Colin WareThe Eyes Have It
A Research Paper by Ben ShneidermanVisualizing Data
A Book by William S. ClevelandExploratory Data Analysis
A Book by John TukeyPlus Equals #4
An Article by Rob WeychertOne of the seeds for Plus Equals was planted a few years ago with Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited, my extension of a Sol LeWitt work. I learned a lot about isometric projection from that project, but my affection for the concept didn’t begin there. Whether I’m looking at a Chris Ware illustration or an exploded-view technical drawing of a complex machine, an isometric rendering always stirs something in me.
In search of visual texture
An Article by Rachel PruddenI’m now more inclined to attribute Looseleaf’s power to its visual texture than to some cognitive media-style abstraction. And the visual texture owes more to the beauty (yes, beauty!) of the original pdfs from the Vasulka Archive. Perhaps the demo is best understood not as a prototype generic tool, but as a specific curated experience in its own right, with form and content claiming equal importance in its overall success.
Even so, I think there are some general lessons that can be drawn from this demo:
- Content is not inert
- Visual texture lets content breathe
- Visual texture lets the eye wander without losing itself
Chartwell
A FontThis set of tools for easily creating graphs is conveniently disguised as a set of fonts. OpenType features are used to interpret and visualize the data. The data remains as editable text, allowing for painless updates.
Windy
A WebsiteBetter colormaps?
An Article by Mark LibermanA modest sample of alternative ways of coloring the same type of 2-D density plots of rates of F0 change and amplitude change.
ImageQuilts
A Tool by Edward Tuftepress.stripe.com
A WebsiteStripe partners with millions of the world’s most innovative businesses. These businesses are the result of many different inputs. Perhaps the most important ingredient is “ideas.”
Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today.
Between the Words
An Artwork by Nicholas RougeuxMoby Dick.
Between the Words is an exploration of visual rhythm of punctuation in well-known literary works. All letters, numbers, spaces, and line breaks were removed from entire texts of classic stories...leaving only the punctuation in one continuous line of symbols in the order they appear in texts. The remaining punctuation was arranged in a spiral starting at the top center with markings for each chapter and classic illustrations at the center.
SeriesHeat
A Website by Jim VallandinghamSearch for a TV Series to see a heatmap of average IMDb ratings for each episode.
Time-based analytics
An Article by Ryan SingerAnalytics apps don't tell you much about usage behavior. You might be able to see how many users performed an event, or how many times they did it. But none of the analytics packages out there are good at showing you how often people do things. Are they using to-dos once a week? Every day? Only signing into the app once a month but happily paying for years?
Time matters. You can't understand usage without time.
Cameras and lenses
An Article by Bartosz CiechanowskiPictures have always been a meaningful part of the human experience. From the first cave drawings, to sketches and paintings, to modern photography, we’ve mastered the art of recording what we see.
Cameras and the lenses inside them may seem a little mystifying. In this blog post I’d like to explain not only how they work, but also how adjusting a few tunable parameters can produce fairly different results.
The Subtleties of Color
A Series by Robert SimmonThe use of color to display data is a solved problem, right? Just pick a palette from a drop-down menu (probably either a grayscale ramp or a rainbow), set start and end points, press “apply,” and you’re done. Although we all know it’s not that simple, that’s often how colors are chosen in the real world. As a result, many visualizations fail to represent the underlying data as well as they could.
tixy.land
A Websitesin(t * x) * cos(t * y)
Creative code golfing.
Zipdecode
A Website by Ben FryA Library Demand List
A Website by Robin SloanThis visualization takes the current New York Times Best Sellers list for combined print and e-book fiction and scales each title according to the demand for its e-book edition at a collection of U.S. public libraries, selected for their size and geographic diversity.
MIT Student Hub
An Article by Alex HogrefeThe project is located on the MIT Campus and will be a “Student Hub” containing restaurants, large event spaces, and smaller study spaces.
V-RESAS
An ApplicationAll in & with the flow
An Article by Buster BensonInfoCrystal
A Research PaperThis paper introduces a novel representation, called the InfoCrystal, that can be used as a visualization tool as well as a visual query language to help users search for information. The InfoCrystal visualizes all the possible relationships among N concepts.
Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think
A Book by Ben Shneiderman
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
The Tao of rationality
If you would learn to think like reality, then here is the Tao:
Since the beginning
not one unusual thing
has ever happened.Everyone sees themselves as behaving normally
To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally.
Argue against the best
To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates.
It’s all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you can’t settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesn’t make it dark out.
Let the meaning choose the word
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.
People can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring it
Knowing the design
Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design.
Cutting through to the truth
The essential thing in the art of epistemic rationality is to understand how every rule is cutting through to the truth in the same movement.
Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon.
Joy in the merely attainable
But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated.
I have failed my art
The novice goes astray and says, “The art has failed me.”
The master goes astray and says, “I have failed my art."Taboo your words
Albert says that people have “free will.” Barry says that people don’t have “free will.” Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by “free will,” on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase “free will” at all.
Your map of reality
Reality is very large—just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I don’t mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny. Comparatively speaking. Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map. But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, “Oh, look, I’m compressing two things into one point on my map.” What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it.
What you're trying to swim
There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what you’re trying to swim.
Applause lights
Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test.
For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI.
If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldn’t balance the risks and opportunities of AI.Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. “We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI” can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalist—the link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light.
Reality just seems to go on crunching
I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answer—not just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answer—because at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculations—or if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward.
Mystery exists in the mind
Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
Lost purposes
There’s chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find there’s no chocolate at the supermarket, you won’t stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves.
It’s another matter when incentives must flow through large organizations—or worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because that’s what’s measurable; and this person doesn’t care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving.