Dec 19th 2007
A good graphic can tell a story, bring a lump to the throat, even change policies. Here are three of history's best

1. Florence Nightingale

2. Charles Joseph Minard

3. William Playfair

We have developed and tested two measures of visual clutter: the Feature Congestion measure, and the Subband Entropy measure.

Feature Congestion measure: This measure of visual clutter is based on the common experience of going to put a note on a colleague's desk. If the desk is uncluttered, it's easy to find a place to put the note where we are confident our colleague will notice it. However, if the desk is cluttered, we tend not to be confident they will notice the note, and perhaps will leave the note on a chair so they will spot it.

This suggests that clutter is related to the difficulty in adding an attention-grabbing item to a display. Visual search models typically attempt to predict the difficulty of searching for a particular target among particular distractors. However, our Statistical Saliency Model can easily make the dual prediction of how difficult it would be to add an attention-grabbing item to a display, and what features that item should have in order to draw attention. Our Feature Congestion measure of visual clutter is based upon this model of visual search.

Subband Entropy measure: This measure of visual clutter is based upon the intuition that a scene or display is less cluttered the more "organized" it is, i.e. the more items "group" together perceptually, whether through use of similar colors, or alignment, or other tricks. A related question to ask is to what extent each part of the display or scene is predictable from the rest of the scene? How redundant is the visual information in the scene?

qutoing Information Aesthetics -

bivariate baseball score plots

31 July 2007

a huge collection of data visualizations aiming to explore Major League Baseball teams' game scores going all the way back to 1814. scores from baseball games are "bivariate data", with each variate being one team's score. the distribution of baseball scores can be viewed from a bivariate point of view, & then be filtered by other attributes such as day of the week, day/night, month, starting pitcher & so on.

 
mapping housing trends over time throughout the US

Essay: "Book Covers"

This essay provides a brief description of Edward Gorey's career, with the emphasis on his extensive book cover designs.  In 1953, he accepted a position at Anchor/Doubleday, doing pasteups and lettering.  Before he left the company in 1960, he had designed approximately fifty book covers.  Author Steve Heller describes the importance of these works.  "These illustrated covers comprise a small but significant chapter in the history of paperback cover design and in the legacy of the white-bearded, fur-coated man who made them.  All but forgotten today, these covers established a visual personality for a company that was founded to reprint many of the world's classic texts, some of which were previously published in paperback versions during the late 1930s and 1940s, when virtually all mass-market books were adorned with prurient covers designed to pander to the voyeuristic reader" (71-2)  Gorey's covers were essential to the success of Anchor's paperbacks, as they established a distinct identity for the company; the artist's style was more mature and refined that that featured on pulp fictions, and it was idiosyncratic, and therefore remained in the viewer's consciousness.