When D3 was released in February 2011, it transformed how we build data visualizations for the web and ushered in a new age of unbridled creativity in information design, data journalism, and beyond. Today, it remains the backbone of modern, interactive data viz.
Happy 15th birthday, D3 ๐
d3js.org
[Study participant recruitment] Share your experiences with visualization experiment design
Hi, we (me and @jheer.org, University of Washington) are looking for interview participants to share experiences and challenges in designing visualization experiments.
Form: forms.gle/RtfJ7M5ELtuR...
Congrats!!
Do you make drag-and-drop interfaces? Or do you wish you did, but they're just too hard?
We're working on a new way to drag & drop! Wanna try it out? Join our study โ we'll ask you about your drag-and-drop experiences, and get your hands on the prototype.
Join here: forms.gle/J82tFtu6DqS8.... ๐!
๐ฃ NEW! Iโve just released the BIGGEST and perhaps most creative project Iโve ever worked on!
โSearching for Birdsโ searchingforbirds.visualcinnamon.com ๐ค
A project, an article, an exploration that dives into the data that connects humans with birds, by looking at how we search for birds.
A hue band (in Oklch, equal in c) of colors shown divided into colors in English and Korean. Where English has one "green," Korean splits into "์ฐ๋์" and "์ด๋ก์." Where English has one "blue," Korean splits into "ํ๋์" and "ํ๋์." Where English has one "purple," Korean splits into "๋ณด๋ผ์" and "์ฐ๋ณด๋ผ์" and "์์ฃผ์."
Many hue bands (in Oklch, each is equal in c) of colors shown divided into colors in English and Korean. Where English has one "green," Korean splits into "์ฐ๋์" and "์ด๋ก์." Where English has one "blue," Korean splits into "ํ๋์" and "ํ๋์." Where English has one "purple," Korean splits into "๋ณด๋ผ์" and "์ฐ๋ณด๋ผ์" and "์์ฃผ์."
Many rings of color bins (in Oklab, equal in l) shown divided into colors in English and Korean. Where English has one "green," Korean splits into "์ฐ๋์" and "์ด๋ก์." Where English has one "blue," Korean splits into "ํ๋์" and "ํ๋์." Where English has one "purple," Korean splits into "๋ณด๋ผ์" and "์ฐ๋ณด๋ผ์" and "์์ฃผ์."
I'm excited to have updated our color naming in different languages project to use the new Oklab/Oklch color space.
The new views highlight the differences in how English and Korean divide blues, greens and purples.
idl.uw.edu/color-naming...
@jheer.org @uwcse.bsky.social @ischool.uw.edu
In 2015, @jheer.org and #UWAllen @idl.uw.edu colleagues unveiled Voyager, a tool that automatically recommends visualizations to aid users exploring datasets. They received the @ieeevis.bsky.social InfoVis 10-Year Test of Time Award for that work. #UWInnovates news.cs.washington.edu/2025/11/19/a...
A 2D binned hexgrid plot with a color encoding that uses hue for the logarithmic order of magnitude and area of a black infill to linearly encode the less significant digits.
Carr et al had a similar idea - applied to color encoding - back in the 80s! (From www.jstor.org/stable/2289444, paywalledโฆ)
Really excited to share this new paper on "Data Visualizations as Propaganda", co-led by PhD students Priya Dhawka and Nina Lutz, which just won a Best Paper award at the CSCW conference: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
[Short thread]
github.com/vega/altair hit 10k โญ๏ธ on GitHub recently. Congrats to the Altair team and the amazing community.
Interested in accessibility, visualization, or data ethics? I'm looking for Ph.D. students to join @data-and-design.org at CU Boulder Info Sci in Fall 2026.
data-and-design.org/recruiting/phd
The data vis project "Mosaic: An Architecture for Linking Databases and Scalable Interactive Visualizations" received a SIGMOD Best Demo Runner Up award at the ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data in Berlin, Germany.
Congrats to the Mosaic team on this recognition! ๐๐
Screenshot from GitHub showing 1k stars for the Mosaic project, an extensible framework for linking database and interactive views.
The Mosaic architecture for database-backed interactive visualization just hit 1,000 stars on GitHub! Thank you to all who have participated and contributed!
Congrats Kaitlyn!!
๐
Hi Lynn, curious if youโve tried LLM based approaches (like LLooM: github.com/michelle123l...) and if so how theyโve fared for you
A webpage that reads "This domain is for sale! CatGPT.com. $220,000 USD."
TFW you have a grand idea only to find it's out of reach. So it goes for my chatbot that meows and purrs.
Allen School professors Brian Curless and Jeffrey Heer named ACM Fellows for helping transform how we use computing technologies news.cs.washington.edu/2025/02/14/a...
Allen School professor Amy X. Zhang receives Sloan Research Fellowship for empowering users to make โour online spaces as rich and varied as our offline onesโ news.cs.washington.edu/2025/02/24/a...
And congrats to you, too!
@joshuahhh.com and I invite you to explore our experimental visual programming environment (which takes place in a dungeon)
Features
- dissolve the bounds of decision and explore all possibilities at once
- use sigillic incantations, delve into recursive caverns
vezwork.github.io/drostes-lair-post
Us #ieeevis 2025 OPCs worked hard on this: the new call for papers is now live! ieeevis.org/year/2025/ye...
Submit your best work!
Brief account of changes for 2025:
* Extra week for supplemental material
* Student reviewer program
* Opt-in publication of reviews for accepted papers
Hi, Iโm a main author of the Vega/Altair curriculum notebooks. Indeed these focus on tool learning and arenโt intended as a standalone text for a full vis course. We combine it with many other papers, links, and lectures, as in courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse5...
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction is looking for outreach editors, i.e., junior researchers who wants to rethink and implement how the journal engages online with readers and authors. Deadline for applications is Dec 11. Call at www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... or ask me for more info.
FWIW it took UW IT about a month to complete our subdomain request, but once set up you can administer it yourself.
Updating DNS records for a top-level UW managed subdomain was painless, too. (We did it for @idl.uw.edu.) You just need to add an `_atproto` sub-subdomain, then add the TXT record to that.
Nice! I loved that work and always thought it would be good to do more like that ๐ค
Congrats Sanjay!
Overview of the DracoGPT-Rank pipeline. (1) User provides prompt templates for an LLM to rank chart pairs; (2) Draco featurizes charts and produces feature vectors consisting of constraint counts; (3) Draco learns constraint weights over LLM-labeled chart pairs by fitting a RankSVM model; (4) The fitted Draco model can be applied to score charts. Results at each stage of the pipeline afford insight into LLM ranking preferences.
People are now using LLMs to create charts and graphs. How might we assess the quality and consistency of the results? DracoGPT is a method that fits a visualization knowledge base (Draco) to LLM responses, enabling comparison across models, prompts, and results from human subjects experiments.
Authoring and visualizing multiverse analyses with Boba. Users start by annotating a script with analytic decisions (a), from which Boba synthesizes a multiplex of possible analysis variants (b). To interpret the results from all analyses, users start with a graph of analytic decisions (c), where sensitive decisions are highlighted in darker blues. Clicking a decision node allows users to compare point estimates (d, blue dots) and uncertainty distributions (d, gray area) between different alternatives. Users may further drill down to assess the fit quality of individual models (e) by comparing observed data (pink) with model predictions (teal).
Love this work! Also related is the Boba project, led by Yang Liu and @kalealex.bsky.social, which includes a variety of multiverse visualization and assessment methods. idl.uw.edu/papers/boba
