5 misconceptions about visualization

Nathan Yau over at FlowingData has a great writeup on visualization, based on his experience as a week-long “Visiting Scholar” at the US Census Bureau.  They’re trying hard to boost their visualization (where else would they have so much data to play with?!), so he had the opportunity to sit with lots of people, both experts and novices.

This is probably the most common one. It’s easy to look at a lot of the best visualization projects and want your data to look and feel the same way. So people ask, “I have such and such data. Is there a visualization technique that I can use to make it look cooler?”

Well, maybe. Not if you only have five data points though. You can spend a lot of time with icons or fancy print, but the graphics are interesting because the data that the visuals represent is interesting.

via 5 misconceptions about visualization.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.