When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it.
Anyway: fund basic research.
I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸
We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto.
The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.
Unreasonably excited to present THEORY IS SHAPES at alt.vis this November! Read on to find out what the "BLT Sandwich Theory of Visualization Consumption" (and other shape-based shenanigans) can teach us about theorycrafting in research 🥪🧲🧊♾️
here's a preprint of the unhinged paper i wrote with @lane
we stop just short of saying that the unthinking use of frequentist statistics puts your very soul at hazard
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08213
📢The open access version of our book is available now via OUP's site: global.oup.com/academic/pro...
Announcing my forthcoming short paper at #ieeevis! In this solo-author work, I examine and critique the logic of generalization about decision support in visualization research. arxiv.org/abs/2508.06751
Link to Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.08383
This work, with Gordon Kindlmann and @kalealex.bsky.social, marks my first paper as a PhD student. I’d love to hear your thoughts! n/n
Furthermore, we unpack broader implications of reframing visualization as a mechanism for data disclosure such as in authoring tools where designers like Fred are recommended possible visualization designs based on their disclosure goals. 8/n
From this analysis, we present a taxonomy of 13 data operations, what we dub disclosure tactics. These tactics give us a shared vocabulary to think about design tradeoffs in terms of disclosure, whether it is to protect privacy, persuade viewers, or simplify complex patterns. 7/n
We analyzed 425 examples of visualization techniques to study how designers made choices about information disclosure - about what information is hidden and what information is revealed in a chart. 6/n
In our new paper, we ask: Can these decisions be made more deliberate? Can we name and describe the operations that shape what a visualization reveals, distorts, or hides? 5/n
Without clear guidance from existing tools, he’s left to experiment until something “looks right,” hoping it meets both goals. 4/n
The image is a four-panel comic illustrating a privacy dilemma in data visualization. In the first panel, a scatterplot shows individual data points, and Fred wants to hide these while still showing clusters. The second panel shows aggregation into a heatmap, which distorts clusters and can still reveal individuals. The third panel depicts adding noise, which hides clusters but requires fine tuning and introduces spurious signals. The fourth panel shows smoothed contour shapes that reveal only the clusters, which Fred finds effective and easy to produce.
For example, imagine a bio-statistician Fred who works at a university medical center. He’s tasked with revealing clusters in patient data to an industry partner, while protecting patient privacy. 3/n
Visualizing real-world data means making tradeoffs: Datasets can be messy, high-dimensional, or contain sensitive information. Designers are constantly making judgment calls about what to show and what to leave out. 2/n
I am excited to share a new paper titled “Designing for Disclosure in Data Visualizations” set to appear at IEEE VIS 2025 (link below). 1/n
@tengshanyuan.info is an incredible researcher and collaborator. He’s hiring students for his new lab at NTU! Don’t miss this opportunity!
LAUNCH DAY 🚀
Today I’m launching a new podcast, Hard Drugs, with Jacob Trefethen (@jacobtref.bsky.social)
Our first episode is about lenacapavir — a new HIV drug that blocks infections with an efficacy rate of nearly 100%, and which could completely change the fight against HIV worldwide.
Do you use data visualizations 📊 or add annotations to them? My collaborators and I are doing a study on how people use visualizations in their work — we'd love to interview you!
Survey: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Book a time: calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0...
Thanks to everybody who chimed in!
I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist.
So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>
🚨Paper alert! 🚨
I'll be presenting my paper visualising multiple forecast distributions at #chi2025! (If you are in-person, the talk is on Wed 11:10am in G414+415)
If you are not interested in probability distributions, I will also be talking about 🦙 alpacas 🦙
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
My student @abhsarma.bsky.social is presenting his work on visualizing forecasts under uncertainty induced by the presence of multiple forecasters at #chi2025 tomorrow! #vis #stats #hci
BTW he's great and he's looking for jobs!!
behold the CONNECTED SPLATTERPIE
kneel before my works, ye mighty, and despair
Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value
I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(
So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/
🌡 New on @ourworldindata.org:
We added global temperature anomaly charts *coloured by El Nino / La Nina periods*.
Today's "cool" years are warmer than "warm" years of the past.
[New article and charts by my colleague Veronika Samborska and I: ourworldindata.org/global-tempe... ]
I really liked this idea of using a histogram as a legend in a choropleth map (since land isn't unemployed; people are), so I made a little guide to doing it with #rstats, {ggplot2}, and {patchwork}
www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/02...
We ( @joshnicholas.com and I ) have just finished a big re-design of our poll tracking page. The redesign had two goals 1) improve the clarity of the summary charts and 2) de-emphasise the mean, and add emphasis on the credibility range/uncertainty of the modelling...
How can helping people think with data benefit society?
Explore the research of Alex Kale (@kalealex.bsky.social), Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at the University of Chicago!
www.youtube.com/shorts/8SkXI...
