VizWorld.com

Robert Kosara has posted his annual “State of Information Visualization” report, covering the rising and falling trends of 2012.

Data journalism keeps getting attention in visualization. There was another workshop at VisWeek on storytelling, as well as two papers on the topic (more on those in a future posting). The academic community is still mostly concerned with data analysis rather than communication, though there is clearly interest. But the world out there is not waiting. The Guardian datablog is collecting and releasing data every day, and more and more stories are now based on numbers and use some form of visualization. It’s easy to complain about the bad ones, but we also need to come up with ideas how to tell stories around data in a constructive way.

In addition, he covers Visual.ly, IE9, ProtoVis, D3, and many other topics.

via The State of Information Visualization, 2012 | eagereyes.

Science kosara

Robert Kosara is celebrating five years of his fantastic “Eagereyes” website, discussing some of the biggest hits and flops during that time.

In dog years, this website is now (almost) as old as I am. Over the years, it has changed both its direction and design several times; there have been times when I was overwhelmed with my readers’ reactions and times when nobody seemed to read the stuff I wrote. While I generally hate “best of” postings and indulging in nostalgia, I want to look back at a few of the things that I believe have shaped this site and how I think about what I’m doing, and revisit a few of the more interesting and/or successful things I’ve managed to do and write over the years.

He mentions that there is still a startling lack of good visualization products, citing Tableau and Visual.ly as exceptions that have stood out.  I always take issue with folks that forget about great apps and tools like VTK, ParaView, VisIt, VAPOR, and CEI’s EnSight, but I suppose he has a point if you’re limiting yourself to basic user-level applications targeted at people with no knowledge of data visualization techniques.

via Five Years of EagerEyes | eagereyes.

Science history, kosara