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This landmark book by EdwardTufte a generation ago remains the gold standard for using 2D graphics to convey mutli-dimensional information quantitatively and qualitatively.  Today I went to a Harvard seminar with the title “Visualization for Everyone: Public, Social, and Collaborative”

Abstract and Bio from the announcement : As data plays anever larger role in society, there’s a critical need for tools to help people understand and reason about complex information.  Our research seeks to make data visualization—originally a tool for experts—accessible to everyone. To succeed as a mass medium, visualization must be simple to use, easy to share,and suited to the kinds of data that people care about. We will discuss these challenges and  projects which address them. First, we’ll present work that explores the collaborative  dimension of visualization. Second, we’ll considersocially important forms of data such as  text and images that don’t fit traditional visualization approaches. We present  new techniques to provide insight into media from books to photographs. Finally, a radical level of simplicity in both authoring and consumption is required for visualization to succeed on a massive scale. We’ll illustrate solutions  to these challenges with data sets ranging from wind flows to global cyberattacks.  This approach to visualization points the way to a future where every citizen can fully participate in a data-driven society.

Speakers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenbergare the leaders of Google’s “Big Picture” data visualization research group,which invents new ways for people to understand and  explore data. They are well known for their contributions to social and collaborative  visualization, and the systems they’ve created are used daily by millions of people.

Viégas has been named bymultiple publications as one of the most influential women in  technology. Her visualizations of email and online conversations led the way for new  social media interfaces. Wattenberg, as a director of R&D at Dow Jones, created ome of the earliest visualizations for digital journalism. Viégas holds aPh.D. from the MIT Media Lab; Wattenberg has a Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C.Berkeley. Their academic work has won multiple “best paper” accolades, and they’ve received several top design and  technology awards. Their visualization-based artwork has been exhibited worldwide, and is part of the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The seminar can be viewed as an update of Tufte’s work taking advantages of modern  advance in digital media in recent decades. All speakers and PowerPoint user should  take note. While it is my impression that in terms of techniques they did not break much  new ground beyond what Tufte did, the new element in visualization  is the social and collaborative effort made possible by the Internet technology. Nowadays, it is people and groups of people getting together to  visualize  data and making use of it. One example the speakers reported is “Wind Map” which  they made possible to view the wind speed and direction all over the US as they evolve  over time. The unexpected result of this visualization are the users of this display from pilots of private airplane to farmers planning to spray fertilizer and pesticide. Another example they illustrated is the “Word Tree”. You type in any words or group of words, you are immediately provided with links to famous texts/books/sourceswhere such group of words appeared. Imagine the utility of such access to information.  The examples are endless.

I do have a minor criticism of the presentation. As leading and innovative experts in visualization,  their PowerPoint talk violated several basic rules of slide making, e.g.,

1.     Too many text on one slide

2.     Using faint grey color for text on white background

3.     Too much information on one slide that distract the audience.

However, the visual demonstration of theirwork was superb and easy to follow.