Data/design folks, what is your favorite visual that focuses on the human cost of violence, tragedies and disasters? The most emotionally impactful visualization? The most visually striking?
Please share! I'd like to get as many examples as possible.
It's (finally) getting easier to produce accessible PDFs with LaTeX in Overleaf: www.overleaf.com/blog/accessi...
Olympic medals are a good place to play with the Emojicon Creator I made last year: emojicon-creator.netlify.app
20 USA medals: 6 x 🥇, 9 x 🥈, 5 x 🥉:
🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇🥈🥈🥈🥈
🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥉🥉🥉🥉🥉
or
🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇
🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈
🥉🥉🥉🥉🥉
Yeah! - maybe it's the interactivity that blurs that space for me? When I first saw the static version, I didn't have that same tension.
I'm all for creating engaging visuals to capture attention, but I have mixed feelings about interactives that seem to use the visual language of charts to imply more data than is represented.
I don't get much from the interaction, but maybe more people will read?
🔗 www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...
Bar graphs of how many gold, silver, and bronze medals that Norway, Italy, and USA have. Each country has its own range, so the bar for USA's 8 silver medals is just as high as Norway's 12 gold medals
An interesting 📊 choice from ESPN's Olympic medal coverage.
By giving each country its own axis-range, the bar for USA's 8 silver medals is the same height as Norway's 12 gold.
If you're trying to compare countries at a glance, USA's bars are all bit taller than they should be.
Snow pack map of colorado. showing regional "percent of average". Colors range from light blue to dark blue, while percentages are in the 40s and 60s (low snowpack!)
Snow pack map of colorado. showing regional "percent of average". Colors range from red to orange to yellow, while percentages are still in the 40s and 60s (low snowpack!)
Two snowpack maps, similar data, very different vibes.
In my vis courses, I always talk to my students about how color associations can manipulate the story of a visualization. This is a great, recent (and local!) example.
U.S. and global steel production over the past decade. The highlighted year-over-year increase in U.S. output is real but small, and looks very different when shown in context versus a tightly cropped comparison.
another look at this generational chart crime
I've been running a new vis course this semester that empowers students to invest in the vis tools, topics, practices that best align with their careers.
Having a set of well-crafted resources like this to pass on is wonderful.
I lost my job, my kids have measles, and masked secret police roam our streets murdering civilians and abducting the witnesses. But at least now we have full sovereignty over a couple of military bases in Greenland.
screenshot of visualization from a weather site of projected snow and ice quantities. The ranges around 30 inches of snow and 0.5 inches of ice cover the same colors.
I love how this graphic is totally unhelpful for determining whether you're going to get 30 inches of snow or half an inch of ice.
Screenshot of AI search results: "Miami loses CFP title game to Indiana; Toney held to 13 yards Miami fell to undefeated Indiana 10-7 in the national championship, with Toney limited to just five touches and 13 yards in the low-scoring affair."
(the game is currently 24-21 with 6 minutes left, and Toney has 115 yards)
Given its quality + faithfulness to source material, I'm still not over The Odyssey going to Christopher Nolan instead of the Muppets
Russ Vought (piss man) tweet about doing piss man shit: The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.
NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇
If you can't find me, I'm the one home sick 😷.
It has been such a great semester together, and we're excited to share some of our ongoing research next year with you!
group photo of lab members and guests sitting on / in front of a couch smiling for the camera
the @data-and-design.org and information visions (@peck.phd) labs celebrated the end of the semester together yesterday! thanks for a great 2025!
#CHI2026 Student Mentoring Program is open for applications: chi2026.acm.org/authors/stud... with a brand new program:
(1) CHI 101
(2) Building a Research Cohort
(3) Dissertation Research Roundtable
Deadline: 22 Jan!
RT friends of @acm-sigchi.bsky.social @chi.acm.org
Image of a bubble map on the Economist of "How remote work is changing American cities". Bubbles on cities have a color map that goes from light-red to dark-red to represent % of workforce working remotely in 2024... except for the highest category of color changes to black
These are the kinds of example I love discussing with students.
What does a city with 19.5%🔴 the workforce look like vs. a city with 20.1%⚫ of the workforce? 🤔
(I feel like I'm picking on the Economist a lot, but their charts consistently get promoted to me + glitch my brain)
I'll always donate part of my day to a good optical illusion, so here are a whole bunch of them:
optical.toys
Tweet from Claude: "Opus 4.5 is available today on our API and on all three major could platforms" Shows a bar graph of software engineering accuracy with a truncated axis, which exaggerates their gains
Not the first time that Anthropic has used truncated bar graph axes to visually exaggerate their performance vs competitors.
🔗 x.com/claudeai/sta...
This has been such a lovely way to start class in my vis course over the past few weeks.
Elon Musk is set to make more than every U.S. elementary teacher combined See how your profession stacks up against Musk’s pay. By Alyssa Fowers and Leslie Shapiro
Every elementary school teacher On average, Musk will make $3 billion more per year than the 1.4 million elementary school teachers in the U.S. combined. Each figure represents 1,500 elementary school teachers. Together, they made $97 billion last year
Humans are bad at big numbers. Which makes it easier for billionaires (and trillionaires) to get away with hoarding wealth. Because most people just can't comprehend how much money that is.
So, I appreciate this WaPo effort to help people visualize what ridiculous amounts of wealth really mean.
My new big visualization project is out: The Trans News Initiative, a collaboration between UM's School of Communication, the Trans Journalists Association, and Polygraph (The Pudding): transnewsinitiative.org Here's a piece about it in the Columbia Journalism Review: www.cjr.org/news/visuali...
3 logos - left - Buffalo Bills logo, center: Bucknell Bison logo, right: CU Buffalo logo. All are Buffalo
My life can be summed up as "same logo, different colors"
🦬 I grew up in upstate NY (giant Bills fan)
🦬 I was a CS prof at Bucknell for almost 10 years
🦬 I am now an Info Sci prof at CU Boulder
Screen-shot of wirecutter page with a big titel that says "The Best Bar Carts"
I'm not proud to tell you that I clicked this Wirecutter article fully believing it was about the 📊 Best Bar Charts.
The 3-year moving avg also exaggerates the data that *is* shown because it cascades the visual impact of the pandemic to surrounding years!
Can someone tell me what is going on with @economist.com's graphic department? This title also has nothing to do with the plotted data.
Are they using charts as clickbait for the article?
Started a thread in the other place and bringing it over here - I really think we should be more vocal about the opportunities that lay at the intersection of these two options!
So I'm starting a live thread of new roles as I become aware of them - feel free to add / extend / share :
What is it about this platform that makes me incapable of writing a post without typos? 🤦
Rare baseball post: I grew up going to Montreal Expos games, and Vladimir Guerrero my all-time favorite ballplayer.
Its surreal to see his son, Vladdy Jr., now fill the baseball headlines.
