Jeff Heer asked me to talk more about the Design, Vision, and Visualization workshop at VisWeek, so here is a list of questions we came up with. While we were not able to discuss them at great length, I think they're very valid, and might lead to a better understanding about how to connect the design and visualization worlds.

The list is based on my notes and what I remember from the discussion, but I also filled in some additional thoughts. Feel free to add and/or disagree in the comments.

How do designers work? What do they actually do?

Few people in visualization know what designers actually do, how they work, how they discuss their work, etc. We need to convince people that design is not just about being artsy or making things pretty. A potential problem is also that visualization researchers might not want to abandon their overall designs, but only expect a designer to make things look better. An understanding is therefore needed what each side can bring to the table, and which part of the work being discussed is the actual subject of a discussion or collaboration.

How can we connect with designers?

The incentives that bring researchers to a conference do not work for designers, and vice versa. It's not easy to set up a forum where the two communities can meet. The best bet right now is to find somebody to work with at your own institution, though there are some roadblocks there, as well (see the other points).

When do we need to go to first principles, perception, etc.?

Designers can't answer all our questions, and often they don't know why something works or should be done a certain way. Sometimes it may be necessary to go back to the basics, perform experiments, etc., to establish how (and if) a particular technique works.

What are the properties/characteristics of data?

When designing a visualization, we have to take the characteristics of the data into account. Or something. Frankly, I don't remember what this point was about.

What is the visual language of the users?

Some fields have well-established visual languages, even if those may not always be optimal. Colors have a certain meaning in chemistry for example, and any attempt to color atoms differently is bound to fail. In some cases, the conventions are not that strict, however, and users can be convinced to abandon them for more effective designs. The question is when that is the case, and how to present a radical new design so that it has a chance of being accepted.

What are the expectations about good and/or effective design?

Design includes being useful, but that is not all there is to it. Depending on the people working together, the definition of what the goal is can vary quite a bit. It really boils down to an actual collaboration and understanding of the other's motivation and way of working, not just throwing something over a wall and expecting what gets thrown back to be perfect.

Perceptually correct vs. aesthetically pleasing?

Similar to the point above, a design that is based on perceptual principles might not be the most aesthetically pleasing, and vice versa. The question is what to insist on and what to accept even if it contradicts things we know.

What are fundamental skills for anybody in visualization?

This was the most intriguing question in my humble opinion: What does everybody in visualization need to know? It still strikes me as odd how few people have any kind of background (or even just interest) in design, photography, or art. I think we need to learn a lot more about visual literacy and acquire more of an appreciation for how other disciplines communicate visually to improve our work. Others may well disagree, though ...

Image by Daniel Skrobak, used under creative commons.

The New York Times' new Visualization Lab uses IBM's Many Eyes technology. While it provides easy access to a wealth of visualization techniques and the possibility to comment, there is one major difference: only data provided by the NY Times can be used. The kind and quality of that data will determine the success of this new site.

I criticized Many Eyes for not having a business model, but figured that they would be able to survive within an organization as large as IBM. Looks like they had a strategy, after all. Martin Wattenberg has also worked with the NY Times (he had a paper at this year's InfoVis conference), and he has an interest in InfoVis for the Masses.

The big difference between Many Eyes and the NY Times VizLab is that users cannot upload their own data. That means that the offered data will be crucial for the success of this site – if it's not interesting, people won't bother going there. And if the data is coming from online sources (and easy to obtain, like the data that is there right now), there will be little difference between the NY Times site and Many Eyes itself.

But that is where the New York Times can offer a huge value-add: by supplying data that cannot be easily found on the web, but that is collected by (or on behalf of) the NY Times. I'm specifically thinking of data like exit poll results, where usually only a small number of cross-sections are published. It would be excellent to have such data available to find some interesting comparisons of voters based on a number of criteria.

The NY Times name will certainly drive traffic, but to make the site compelling and make people come back, an investment in good data will be needed.

VisWeek 2008 was an interesting set of conferences again. The live-blog is now archived, and here are a few thoughts on blogging a conference. I had a long summary written up, but it was mostly redundant with the live-blog, so it makes more sense to go there. I will write up further things at greater length over the next few weeks.

This was my first experiment with live-blogging, and it was quite interesting. I knew that Twitter's 140-character limit would be too little, but the postings grew a bit longer than I had originally expected. The Microblog box took up most of the visible frontpage, when it was really meant to only fill the top half on most screens. The postings were still fairly superficial, more pointers than descriptions of what the papers were really about.

The posting frequency reflected my level of interest and fatigue: I tend to need a break after three days of conference, which is why postings got sparse on Wednesday. It was also sometimes a challenge to write about the previous paper while listening to the next presentation, and I ended up only talking about one or two per session because of that. There were also some longer sessions that I attended (a workshop and a tutorial) during which I did not post anything.

Writing while listening also didn't give me any time to review and reflect what I was writing. While that may be the way a lot of blogs work, it's certainly not my preferred way of writing (and this is not a blog, after all ;). I had to go back and correct typos and other mistakes a few times.

I only wrote about what was presented at the conference, I did not read the papers. The presentation certainly makes some things look more exciting than they really are, and may even hurt good work. Hadley commented on one entry that he was not excited about a paper I liked, and I've been contacted about another posting I made where I said that I found a paper less than exciting. Putting out my personal impressions opens the door for criticism, and also corrections.

One last thing I'm going to say about this is how easy it was to build the infrastructure for the live-blog using Drupal's Content Construction Kit and Views. i spent the most time tweaking the design of the box and display of the messages and feed. Setting up the new posting type etc. was really easy once I had figured out how to use Views.

If you missed the conference, you can re-live the drama and excitement in the VisWeek 2008 Liveblog Archive. Also, check out Carlos Scheidegger's visualization, etc. and Alark Joshi's Visualization Blog for more coverage.

A story is making the rounds recently that the Obama campaign has received many contributions with "odd" amounts (i.e., not whole dollars), which is supposedly proof that Obama was being funded by foreign money. Here is a quick look at the data, which shows some interesting patterns, but no evidence of foreign intervention.

The whole story is of course non-sensical: if people were really charging their foreign credit cards, they would still send whole dollar amounts, since amounts are always specified in the target currency. But the much stronger evidence that the argument is nonsense is in the following image (multiples of 10 are colored blue, multiples of 5 (which are not multiples of 10) are green. Of the more than two million contributions, almost 94% were whole numbers, so the 0 cents case is not shown below.

As you can see, the distribution is very uneven (unlike what you would expect from the result of currency conversion). Multiples of five (and thus "round" cents) are much more common than values in between. The most common amount, though, is .95 – strange perhaps, but definitely done on purpose. The number .01 stands out (for the winner, presumably), and .08 quite obviously because of the year (I've read of people contributing $20.08 every month and the Obama Store also sells a lot of swag for that amount). "Odd" amounts in between are also explained by a list of cent "attributions" to a variety of blogs – and by rounding (when you buy something and you round the amount up to some nice number, so the difference becomes a contribution).

Interestingly, McCain's data looks quite different. Of the roughly 400,000 contributions, less than 0.2% have fractional parts. The only strong pattern is at .50, most of the others seem rather random.

Getting the Data

Finding this data was much more difficult than expected. The FEC publishes campaign contribution data, and it is possible to download their reports as a large file. It took me a lot of time to finally figure out their horrible COBOL-style file format and be sure (because I thought I was just missing something) that they were only reporting whole dollars. I had to get the actual filing data (at the very bottom of the FTP page) and wade through another horrible format (which also changed over time) to finally get to the data. It is a mystery to me why they only report whole numbers, with the number of contributions, those cents add up.

Thanks to Robert Morton, who pointed me to the right place in a comment below. I have updated the charts with that data, which has changed the overall numbers a bit, but hasn't had an impact on the patterns.

The Chart

The chart was made in Excel this time, because I had trouble getting Numbers to show me the right axis labels. I used the stacked bar chart idea with three columns, two of which were zero in each row. This way, it was easy to get different colors for multiples of 5 and 10. If there is any interest, I can make the parsed data and the Excel file available.

The glimpses have comments enabled, so feel free to click through if you feel the urge to comment on something I write. Also, let me know how you like the microblog, what I should change, etc. I will keep tweaking this throughout the week.

But don't entirely ignore the stuff below the box, either, there will be an update or two there as well, but obviously most of my time and energy will be spent on other things.

Also check out Carlos Scheidegger's visualization, etc. blog for coverage of Vis sessions.

As promised earlier, I will be live-blogging VisWeek 2008, which will take place next week in Columbus, OH. I will mostly attend InfoVis and VAST, with the odd Vis session and workshop thrown in. The live-blog will appear in a box at the top of the frontpage, and there will be a separate RSS feed for these posts. Coverage should start Sunday (October 19) morning, and there will also be pictures.

This is an experiment, and we'll see how much interest there will be. The idea is stolen from Mr. FlowingData, though in contrast I'm planning on actually following through. ;) I will write about the sessions I attend, papers I find notable, and any insights I think are worth sharing.

The plan is to write about 5-10 postings a day, depending on things I find interesting and how much time I have. I call these "glimpses," as a little play on "tweets." The reason I'm not using Twitter for this is that Twitter is just too limiting for any kind of meaningful comment, and I want to be able to post links without that abomination of tinyURL. I'm also still debating whether to activate comments on those glimpses, because they're not really meant to be full postings (i.e., there won't be a teaser and body, only the body) – but that's another thing I can't do with Twitter.

Having said that, I do use Twitter, and I will tweet things when I don't have my laptop with me, or the information does not seem relevant enough for this site.

I will also take pictures, as I have in the past (like at Vis 2004 and 2005, and a few other venues). I will try to post these quickly to Flickr, and then link there from here. Expect pictures especially from the social events, and perhaps a few taken during the day (I generally do not carry my camera with me all the time, especially because I'm not staying at the conference hotel).

To those of you going to Columbus, I hope to meet many of you! And to the rest: I hope you'll at least get an idea of what you're missing from the liveblog ...

Teaser image from the always brilliant xkcd (used under creative commons).