If you're interested in pursing a teaching-focused academic career in computing, make sure to check out the (online) workshop series that @peck.phd and I will be running in May!

After attending 10 of 11 @acm-sigchi.bsky.social CHIs from 2009-2019, I'm going for the first time in 7 years next week; now with a new rank, new institution, new lab, and new gray hairs.

Feel free to send me a DM/email. I'm eager to reconnect with folks I haven't seen in too-long #chi2026

A calendar block labeled "yup"

WTF does this mean, past-Evan?

Since I'm using Ziptable to share data in my own class, I made a small change a couple of days ago to make my instructor flow better

You can now filter columns to reduce dataset size, share shorter links, or choose targeted exports (e.g. to Datawrapper)

Orig 🧵 on Ziptable: bsky.app/profile/peck...

I'm here for more Spire 2 reviews - I haven't touched it yet, and I'm scared to before the semester ends

A screenshot of a Reddit thread from the subreddit r/cscareerquestions titled "Meta planning sweeping layoffs, 20% of company." ​The thread features a discussion about developer burnout and AI. One user, termd, comments that productivity gains attributed to AI are actually the result of developers working longer hours to avoid being fired. Another user, Cptcongcong, who claims to work at Meta, agrees, stating they worked from 8 am to 1 am the previous week. Other users chime in, sharing similar experiences at their own companies, with one concluding, "Sad times to be a software engineer." At the bottom of the screen, there is a promoted advertisement from OpenAI for Codex.

That calibration seems to be pretty messy...

Another update - if you know the focus of our research lab, a change like this was probably inevitable 😀

bsky.app/profile/peck...

A quick update to ziptbl.com: you can now open shared data directly in @datawrapper.de!

The video shows the full flow: load data into Ziptable > share the link > create a 📊 in Datawrapper

As always: the data stays off any servers until you send it to Datawrapper - it's just compressed in the url

Browsers are pretty good at accepting giant URLs - it turns out that the harder part is sharing them. Different platforms truncate links over some limit - I can share a 30k-char on Gmail, but it fails on most non-email platforms (Slack, bluesky, etc). I tried to build in sharing advice in that meter

You all have engaged far more than I could have expected. Thank you! Here's a quick update based on some interactions and feedback: bsky.app/profile/peck...

Holy smokes - thanks for all the ZipTable love! A small update:
- 🗺️ GeoJSONs! Share geo data and open it directly in geojson.io (vid)
- Better sharing guidance based on link length (email vs. Slack vs. SMS)
- Faster! Only 65 KBs on 1st load now. Repeat visits are ~3.5 KB. That's dial-up modem fast 😂

It's less the browsers that choke, and more the platforms that put hard limits on link lengths. I can have URL lengths of 300k+ if shared via some email clients, but the limits are far far tinier on platforms like this (or Slack or text). It's a moving target.

Yup! - I gave Claude a rough prototype, which I think helped.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll definitely take a look at this

Encoding's goal is only to shorten (using DEFLATE or LZ-String), not too improve privacy... so if someone gets the URL, it's easy to decode the data.

A good analogy is an unlisted YouTube link - nearly impossible to discover, but if you have access to the url, you can watch the video too.

If you're looking to push dataset size, share via email.

A lot of platforms (like Slack, Teams, etc.) reject super long urls, but I've emailed (& opened) a 300k+ character link on Outlook & Gmail. Verified with this text-heavy 2MB dataset - corgis-edu.github.io/corgis/csv/a...

Nerdy follow-up: one of the fun side-effects of this hacky design is that the performance is FAST & cache-friendly.

A return visit is < 4 KB, and since all the data + computation is local, it feels near-instant on any internet speed.

Even your 1st visit is only ~175 KB (~90KB is font-awesome, lol)

I made this partly for me. I often want to share datasets on-the-fly with my students, and cloud-storage has just enough friction to be annoying.

Also, it's kind of nice to be able to share data, but still have the option to keep it off servers and (maybe?) out of hungry AI training sets.

I made a tiny tool for quickly sharing small datasets (< ~1000 rows) without uploading any data to a server.

🔗 ziptbl.com

It compresses the data into the link itself, so there’s no account, hosting, or storage layer involved.

Here's Florence Nightingale's famous 📊 data:
ziptbl.com#d=eNpdlE-LGz...

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.

Accessible PDFs with LaTeX An online LaTeX editor that’s easy to use. No installation, real-time collaboration, version control, hundreds of LaTeX templates, and more.

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.