eagereyesTV Episode 2: Unit Charts, Dot Plots, ISOTYPE, and What Makes Them Special

Charts usually show values as visual properties, like the length in a bar chart, the location in a scatterplot, the area in a bubble chart, etc. Unit charts show values as multiples instead. One famous example of these charts is called ISOTYPE, and you may have seen them in information graphics as well. They’re an interesting family of charts and they seem to have some unusual properties that most other charts don’t have.

This is the second video on my YouTube channel, eagereyesTV. Watch it below or click here to be taken to YouTube.

Topics I cover in the video:

• ISOTYPE
• ISOTYPE books, I have a series of posts on those (with more coming soon)
• My paper with Steve Haroz and Steven Franconeri, ISOTYPE Visualization – Working Memory, Performance, and Engagement with Pictographs
• Stephen Few doesn’t like unit charts
• Hannah Fairfield’s piece The Tenure Pipeline at Harvard Business School
• For the Elderly, Diseases that Overlap, also by Hannah Fairfield
• That 2001 paper on how visual representation can influence decision making
• Uncertainty reasoning paper by Matt Kay, Jessica Hullman, and others, that uses dot plots as one stimulus type

Please don’t hesitate to ask questions, post suggestions, etc.!