Visualization Potpourri, March 2018

Time to wake up from the eagereyes winter hibernation with an aromatic potpourri! This time, we have news about pies, stippling, colors, sorting algorithms, and a few more. Also a video of my collaborator Noeska singing the praises of medical visualization.

Danielle Albers Szafir was named one of the 30 under 30 in Science by Forbes. You might remember her from my VIS report last year and the portrait I posted as the first (and so far only one…) in my portrait series (more portraits coming, I promise).

Pie news! Lisa Charlotte Rost has written a nice piece about pie charts the on data wrapper blog. Jon Schwabish is also starting to love pie charts, using some colorful language. Combining two of my interests, this news piece using an ISOTYPE pie is pretty interesting.

Since somebody has been sleeping at the wheel on this site, it's worthwhile to link to the tireless Andy Kirk's most notable developments in visualization, July through December 2017. Also check out January through June if you missed it.

Before handing things over to Noeska Smit for the items below, check out this video of her talking about how awesome medical visualization is.

Domingo Martín et al. recently released Stippleshop in a collaboration between Team AVIZ–Inria-Saclay, Paris, and the Computer Graphics Group at the University of Granada, Spain. Stippleshop serves as a demo for their Survey of Digital Stippling paper and allows people to play with stippling effects on their own or provided images. In addition to the coolness of offering a small toolkit with a survey paper, I am happy to see the *shop naming tradition continue (PhotoShop, VolumeShop, RegistrationShop,...).

Stippled eagereyes logo generated by StippleShop

Morolin has made some some lovely short videos visualizing the behavior of sorting algorithms. She/he started out doing this in a rainbow colormap that was burning my eyes, but redid it in Viridis later, and the people rejoiced.

Speaking of colors, Elijah Meeks has written up some great advice for people on picking good colors for data visualization in D3. The recent release of D3 v5 killed the (often wrongly used) category20 colorscale, and Elija discusses good options for what to use instead.