Papers contains snack-sized discussions of papers and other things I’ve read - I’ll try to give you the main points so you can decide if you want to read them yourself.
The essay Design and Redesign by Viegas and Wattenberg is an important bridge between the design culture (of design and redesign) and data visualization. It has a great discussion of how designers use critique and redesign, and how this can be used (and abused) in visualization. At the time (2015) it was trying to bring design culture to visualization, and the importance of visualization to designers.
Read more…I really like the book Discussing Design. Here is an AI generated summary of what is in it. The authors give away the first chapter. This summary can help you decide if you want to read more than that.
Read more…The “Problem Space” paper describes a way to think about the problem a visualization is trying to solve, rather than the solution. It proposes six aspects to consider, named for the “5Ws and an H” from journalism: Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How.
Read more…We often think of interaction as a solution to visualization problems as it has many upsides. However, there are costs to the user (beyond the obvious costs in terms of design, implementation and deployment). The paper “A Framework of Interaction Costs in Information Visualization” by Heidi Lam gives a nice way to think about these costs. It’s an adaptation of earlier work in HCI, but she shows how appropriate it is. She validates the framework by applying it in a broad survey of visualization papers.
Read more…Many (if not all) visualizations are about making comparisons in the data. I’ve spent a lot of effort to come up with ways of thinking about comparisons, or (if you prefer) to think about visualization in terms of comparison. These were summarized in a 2017 paper (it has a 2018 publication data) “Considerations for Visualizing Comparison”.
Read more…The paper An Algebraic Process for Visualization Design by Gordon Kindlmann and Carlos Scheidegger is something that influenced my thinking a lot. It is a great example of visualization formalism that has a big and practical payoff in how we think about visualizations. It came back to mind recently.
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