eagereyes

They're gone. I interviewed the founders recently, the story was published on my website today: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/the-rise-and-fall-of-swivel I'll also be following up with another story soon about the when and why the final decision was made (the story above mostly talks about how they got started and mistakes that were made, not the specific reasons they shut down).

The model is wrong from the inside out. The tools you mention are a shadow of Microsoft Word which is a shadow of a paper document. Living documents are best modeled as a network of small text that have structured relationships and attributes and that support multiple task-based views. For instance you might go to a meeting, jot a bunch of ideas down, break it up into a bunch of "post-it notes", turn some set of those into a set of tasks and requirements. Add relationships and attributes similar to what is in JIRA and you've got a project plan. Why hasn't it happened yet? People who tried to fly before the Wright Brothers did not understand that flight involved control in 6 degrees of freedom and that the problem was not lift or thrust (don't need thrust at all to make a glider!) but not tumbling. Most of them understood some of the requirements but did not address all of them. They could get off the ground in some cases but not stay off the ground! For instance seeing the relationship of texts in a graph is part of the solution, but if the graph looks like this https://eagereyes.org/techniques/graphs-hairball it is part of the problem. The answer isn't (just) a magic layout algorithm but is in letting the user customize task-specific views of the document complex.

An important mnemonic technique that visual programming languages can exploit is called the "Method of Loci" or "Memory Palace": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci >The method of loci (loci being Latin for "places") is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique. This method is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria). Many memory contest champions report using this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22090159 >The Method of Loci is an ancient technique that used to be taught for thousands of years as a standard part of a classical eduction, way back when people needed to remember things before the invention of smartphones and printing presses. But in the middle ages it was banned for being immoral! Apparently, some bad apples were abusing the Method of Loci to remember "immoral" things they shouldn't be thinking about, using "fabulous" images they shouldn't be imagining. https://www.guildsomm.com/4cb697f52c/discussion_forums/f/general-discu… >>Remember to use physical objects in these palaces since they have easily imaginable…

>There are no humans that "can't" hear the difference between L and R. You'd be surprised. There are no 100% objective sounds the ear directly hears -- interpretation and identification of sounds happens at the brain, and a person that was raised with a specific language/pronunciation can be "deaf" to the difference of certain sounds. Evidence from Best & Strange (1992) and Yamada & Tohkura (1992) suggest that Japanese speakers perceive English /r/ as somewhat like the compressed-lip velar approximant /w͍/ and other studies[4] have shown speakers to hear it more as an ill-formed /ɺ/. Goto (1971) reports that native speakers of Japanese who have learned English as adults have difficulty perceiving the acoustic differences between English /r/ and /l/, even if the speakers are comfortable with conversational English, have lived in an English-speaking country for extended periods, and can articulate the two sounds when speaking English. Japanese speakers can, however, perceive the difference between English /r/ and /l/ when these sounds are not mentally processed as speech sounds. Miyawaki et al. (1975) found that Japanese speakers could distinguish /r/ and /l/ just as well as native English speakers if the sounds were acoustically manipulated in a way that made them sound less like speech (by removal of all acoustic information except the F3 component). Lively et al. (1994) found that speakers' ability to distinguish between the two sounds depended on where the sound…

Without commenting on the science or validity of the study...the map implementation here could be improved, in fact, it's about as confusingly implemented as an infographic could be. First of all, it violates the "rainbow map" rule, in that a wide spectrum of color is used to graph what is basically a very simple continuum: more depression vs. less depression. http://eagereyes.org/basics/rainbow-color-map Second of all, and most egregiously, it uses the most confusing color scheme possible. At least in America, which is the WaPo's main audience, the color blue is widely used to describe "depression" ('feeling the blues'). While red is often used to describe a dangerous or very intense situation...it's not really appropriate here, as red is also used for "passion", which is not mutually exclusive to depression, but is not usually associated with it either. And the purple, rather than acting as a middle ground between "more" and "less" depression, comes off as its own weird symbolism. And why the f-ck is "gray" in between blue and purple? And of course, in America (and especially among the audience that the Washington Post serves), red and blue often indicate political thought. It's hard to think of how this map could be any more confusing, even without getting into the discussion of how country/state-color maps greatly distort the quantities involved. ---- That said, I was surprised to see that the United States ranked on the low side...my intuition was that well-off…

Thought it was going to be this (from 17 years ago): - https://www.benfry.com/zipdecode/ - https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/446666 Of course, the results are pretty similar. --- Another interesting ZIP code visualization: https://eagereyes.org/zipscribble-maps/united-states

The idea of "bot" interfaces like this (as opposed to what's termed "direct manipulation" UI) go back a long time, and are subject to quite a bit of debate in the field of usability. The issues are summed up here pretty well, but it will be interesting to see how long the issues persist as (or if!) AI gets better from now on: https://eagereyes.org/blog/2016/the-personified-user-interface-trap I think as with most things, there is probably a complementary relationship which depends heavily on the context of use. Whether the context in the case of a resume for a hiring manager is any good I'm not really able to say.

There is a presentation by Edward Tufte claiming that PowerPoint caused, in part, the shuttle disaster. Hang on... The claim is that PP's economy of words meant that the presentations to each level of management got more and more dismissive of the danger, the higher up the chain they went. Euphemisms got more and more bland, until the top people thought "screw it, we're launching." Note that I'm not endorsing that theory, since I haven't seen the slide decks that got used. It's disputed here: https://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-the-challeng… I find that dismissal to be completely missing the point. Tufte wasn't arguing physics, he was arguing that PP euphemisms caused top execs to minimize the danger.

Another bizarre example of reinvention, but unmitigated by ignorance: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085… For comment: https://eagereyes.org/series/peer-review/1-quilt-plots First author is now an A/Prof at one of Australia's top Universities.

> The idea behind Chernoff faces (or using faces for data visualization) seems good: we humans are very good at distinguishing faces Except that: 1. We humans are actually _ABYSMAL_ at distinguishing faces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect) 2. The ability to differentiate between two things and the ability to translate attributes into metrics are fundamentally so different from each other that any possible truth to the idea instantly becomes wildly irrelevant. https://eagereyes.org/criticism/chernoff-faces

It's a connected scatterplot. There's quite common in certain contexts (e.g. the Phillips curve in Economics). The lines indicate the joined points represent successive measurements. There's a nice paper describing the history and evaluating their effectiveness [1] [1]: https://eagereyes.org/papers/the-connected-scatterplot-for-presenting-…

Some of the engineers at Thiokol whose work Tufte criticized have responded over the years. There's at least one painfully academic paper out there, although if you wanted to you could start here: http://www.onlineethics.org/Topics/ProfPractice/Exemplars/BehavingWell… https://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-the-challeng… It's been longer since I read Feynman but I recall his assessment as being a lot more grounded, and fairer to the engineers.

Cool article, but if I may say, rainbow graphs are hard for me (and many other people) to parse. http://betterfigures.org/2014/11/18/end-of-the-rainbow/ https://eagereyes.org/basics/rainbow-color-map Not that it makes the article significantly weaker though, but yeah.

This rings a bell inside my head; given people from a language/culture with two different words for what English speakers would identify as barely different shades of the same colour, they are objectively better at identifying those two shades than the native English speaker. Which essentially gives the answer "yes" to your question. Here's a reference that might be what's ringing inside my head: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11759-russian-speakers-get-the-b… Particularly relevant quote: "This is the first time that evidence has been offered to show cross-linguistic differences in colour perception in an objective task" Here's more: https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name

You're absolutely right. Everyone harps on pie charts for being awful for element-to-element comparisons. This mainly stems from Tufte's work and experiments from Cleveland and McGill. However, in part-to-whole relationship tasks, pie charts can outperform bar charts, since in bar charts there is no true "whole". (In addition to Few's post, Kosara has more on this: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/in-defense-of-pie-charts)

I think you might give the title to Swivel, which beat Many Eyes by a couple months. [http://eagereyes.org/criticism/swivel-vs-many-eyes] I'm not sure which one of them lasted longer. [http://eagereyes.org/criticism/the-rise-and-fall-of-swivel] In contrast, Tableau Public headed in the opposite direction from both of those, striving not to be a social network but instead focus on being embedded elsewhere. I think the number of true viz geeks in the world is dwarfed by the number of people who are interested in particular data. But I'm not even sure that Visual.ly is trying to be anything more than a niche network here.

Boisjoly and others have argued that Tufte's criticism is misguided, as he misunderstands the engineering: http://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf . Shorter blog summary here: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-the-challenge…

There's a good analysis of how to design a visualization that shows both approval and disapproval here: http://eagereyes.org/blog/2012/embracing-uncertainty-two-line-charts

Be sure to read about these startups which failed trying to do something similar: Verfiable: http://stuartroseman.com/post/619953720/out-with-the-old-business-in-w… http://eagereyes.org/blog/2010/end-of-verifiable-com Swivel: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/the-rise-and-fall-of-swivel I guess the takeaway is that the business model is probably B2B, and you need to fulfill a real need.

Not in a web device/timeframe combination to give this a proper look, but definitely like what I briefly had a chance to read. Already saved to revisit later. For anyone else that enjoyed this and is not aware of Parallel Sets: http://eagereyes.org/parallel-sets Personally, I've found few good real-world use cases for PSets. But I've found it to be helpful for experimenting, even though I rarely use it for any end-product charts. [edit: One last thing before I'm out of range. I'm sure most folks interested in this are familiar, but if not... BumpCharts: http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/2005/07/in_praise_of_th.html ]

"Visualization is not Periodic, Period!" http://eagereyes.org/blog/2009/visualization-is-not-periodic.html

Also touched on in the sections on "Fisheye View" by Leung et al., "A Review and Taxonomy of Distortion-Oriented Presentation Techniques" in Card et al., "Readings in Information Visualization", Morgan Kaufman, 1999. A bit of googling also turns up http://eagereyes.org/blog/2008/fisheye-calendar-at-yahoo.html and a PDF of Bederson's paper on Fisheye calendars http://www.lib.umd.edu/drum/bitstream/1903/1201/1/CS-TR-4368.pdf

Well... sure, not as useful, but I still think it's interesting. For instance, in english we have multiple words (goat, sheep) for what in chinese is a single word (yang2). If an unsupervised model split our mammals which have fur and bleet into two categories 'concept 19281' and 'concept 19282', we might think that it's done well to separate the goats and the sheep, but the chinese speaker might think that it's failed to group the same animal together. Now imagine that reversed, that what we considered one thing could be considered 2 or more by the model, we had just never thought of them separate because we had no words to describe them. There are many of these examples, where one language has one concept that's split among others in another language, and the speakers of the first language might never know the difference unless those words exist. A good example is colors: https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name

Live link: http://eagereyes.org/Applications/ZIPTPCMap.html