Posted in visualization on Nov 14th, 2008
The junk food of data visualization has found a home. Pie charts show up everywhere, just like trans fats. Visual analysis expert Stephen Few condemns them, and I’ll bet Tableau Software designers held their noses the day they added pie-chart templates.
Posted in visualization on Jul 28th, 2008
Blogger Nicholas Goodman writes that Tableau’s visual analysis tool is not actually radical or revolutionary. He trivializes it as if it were a Coke machine with a cool new button.
For now, let’s not quibble about the meaning of radical, revolutionary, or button. Let’s not worry about the title of Nicholas’s post, “Sexy vs. experience,” stated [...]
Posted in visualization on Jul 22nd, 2008
It’s hard to watch Tableau Software CEO Christian Chabot and Tableau visual-analysis demos and not think of Steve Jobs and Mac OS X. Chabot has the same bright stage presence, and his product has the same simplicity and elegance. Like Mac, Tableau makes you love it.
In Monday’s keynote, Chabot couldn’t pace. The conference’s overflow [...]
Posted in visualization on Jul 20th, 2008
I often have to suppress a question while I listen to pitches for BI “solutions.” I want to interrupt and ask, “Hey, isn’t most of what you’re saying just bullshit?”
I’ve found an exception. That voice didn’t even make a peep Sunday as the three-day Tableau Software user conference unfurled in Seattle. Last night at a [...]
Posted in visualization on Feb 7th, 2008
Be sure you don’t miss Alex Vollmer’s excellent review of election day infographics. He wanted to see the margins of victory, percentage of precincts reporting, number of delegates at stake, and other goals. He looked at the New York Times online, CNN, National Public Radio and other media.
Posted in visualization on Jan 14th, 2008
I guess even the guys who live and breathe data get lost in it sometimes.
At one power company that enlisted the help of Houston-area Visual Numerics, there was so much data that no one knew how to start pulling it apart. Only when company analysts saw it visualized did they know what questions to ask.
Marketing [...]
Posted in in media, visualization on Dec 6th, 2007
Today’s Wall Street Journal Online uses tag clouds—the first I’ve seen on that site—to compare Mitt Romney’s statement on religion with John F. Kennedy’s statement in the fall of 1960 as he ran for president.
It’s great to see the Wall Street Journal getting into information visualization (a.k.a. “infovis” among aficionados).
No big story has popped out [...]
Posted in visualization on Dec 3rd, 2007
It’s not the kind of visualization we’ve been talking about, but it works. This brief video on YouTube makes carbon dioxide more than visible. The CO2 becomes scary.
Posted in visualization on Nov 21st, 2007
I attended the IEEE InfoVIS 2007 conference in Sacramento, held October 28-30, and wrote about it for TDWI: “Visualization: Just Look What’s Coming.”