visual analysis

My latest at ‘BI This Week’: ’07 events and ’08 trends

December 19, 2007

Events and Trends: A Conversation About 2007 and 2008 (12/19/2007) Acquisitions of pure-play BI vendors was the big story, but the meaning will play out in 2008. How will the smaller vendors find a place in the new ecosystem?

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Wall Street Journal tag clouds compare Romney and JFK

December 6, 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 [...]

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Visualization of another kind makes CO2 visible

December 3, 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.

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The debate over “useful” visualization

November 27, 2007

That winery of mid-’60s TV fame Italian Swiss Colony and its mascot “that little old winemaker, me” often seems to apply in surprising places.

A few weeks ago at a visualization conference, the business intelligence community’s leader in visualization design, Stephen Few <>, told the room full of dedicated visualizers to be more useful. Some took exception.

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BI This Week: Sacramento visualization conference

November 21, 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.”

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Running with the infovis geeks

October 31, 2007

This afternoon the geeks and the grad students who drove the IEEE InfoVIS (information visualization) conference with their clever but mostly useless inventions swarmed into the hotel lobby for some reason that only their well-wired brains understand. They are a different crowd from the one I’ve seen lately. This year I’ve only been to business [...]

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Managing by walking around with a dashboard on your head

August 7, 2007

Imagine an executive walking around with a “dashboard” on his head. It looks like a pair of sporty sunglasses, but it does much more. Whereever he turns his head, pop-up windows tell him what he’s looking at. He doesn’t even have to ask “What’s going on in that cubicle?” Detailed background on everyone from temps [...]

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Facing up to the dashboard metaphor

July 27, 2007

After about three quarters of an oatmeal stout, my old friend Sam the BI developer wondered aloud, “What is the ideal dashboard?” There was no need to call Steve Few or Edward Tufte. I had the answer right away. (I had been sipping an oatmeal stout myself.)

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Blinded by the “check engine” light

June 13, 2007

Late last month on the Juice Analytics weblog, they were talking about Stephen Few’s new concept, the “faceted analytics display.“ I like the idea, and I’m sure FADs are important. I just hate to see Few resort to a new term because inept designers have spoiled “dashboard.” Dashboard is a valuable metaphor and should be [...]

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