VisWeek 2010

The one-minute edition

I really liked Hadley Wickham’s tutorial on using R and ggplot2. You don’t need R programming skills to analyse datasets with ggplot2 and come up with charts like these, although it doesn’t hurt.

Sunday

It was nice to see Vadim Ogievetsky demo protovis the way it should be used. Incidentally, protovis 3.3, which includes animation, is about to be released. Protovis for java is also available.

Monday

This was the day on the workshop where I spoke. There were other sessions on storytelling, such as this remarkable paper from Edward Segel and Jeff Heer.

Tuesday

My favorite session of that day was Lars Grammel’s talk on how information visualization novices construct visualizations . This charts show the various barriers that they encounter.

Wednesday

The presentation of (again) Had Wickham on graphical inference in infovis presents an interesting idea. Can an impartial viewer tell the difference between one data representation, and that of several similar, but generated datasets? If many such viewers can tell apart the original representation, then it is significantly different from the others. (see also this)

Thursday

This paper by Danyel Fisher shows how advanced visualizations (such as those made with processing, protovis, flash or this here bing map) can be brought into Excel, using data from the workbooks – the best of both worlds, often represented very far apart from each other.

Friday