When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸 We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto. The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.

Unreasonably excited to present THEORY IS SHAPES at alt.vis this November! Read on to find out what the "BLT Sandwich Theory of Visualization Consumption" (and other shape-based shenanigans) can teach us about theorycrafting in research 🥪🧲🧊♾️

here's a preprint of the unhinged paper i wrote with @lane we stop just short of saying that the unthinking use of frequentist statistics puts your very soul at hazard https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08213

📢The open access version of our book is available now via OUP's site: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Announcing my forthcoming short paper at #ieeevis! In this solo-author work, I examine and critique the logic of generalization about decision support in visualization research. arxiv.org/abs/2508.06751

I am excited to share a new paper titled “Designing for Disclosure in Data Visualizations” set to appear at IEEE VIS 2025 (link below). 1/n

@tengshanyuan.info is an incredible researcher and collaborator. He’s hiring students for his new lab at NTU! Don’t miss this opportunity!

LAUNCH DAY 🚀 Today I’m launching a new podcast, Hard Drugs, with Jacob Trefethen (@jacobtref.bsky.social) Our first episode is about lenacapavir — a new HIV drug that blocks infections with an efficacy rate of nearly 100%, and which could completely change the fight against HIV worldwide.

Do you use data visualizations 📊 or add annotations to them? My collaborators and I are doing a study on how people use visualizations in their work — we'd love to interview you! Survey: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Book a time: calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0...

Thanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

🚨Paper alert! 🚨 I'll be presenting my paper visualising multiple forecast distributions at #chi2025! (If you are in-person, the talk is on Wed 11:10am in G414+415) If you are not interested in probability distributions, I will also be talking about 🦙 alpacas 🦙 dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

My student @abhsarma.bsky.social is presenting his work on visualizing forecasts under uncertainty induced by the presence of multiple forecasters at #chi2025 tomorrow! #vis #stats #hci BTW he's great and he's looking for jobs!!

behold the CONNECTED SPLATTERPIE kneel before my works, ye mighty, and despair

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :( So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

🌡 New on @ourworldindata.org: We added global temperature anomaly charts *coloured by El Nino / La Nina periods*. Today's "cool" years are warmer than "warm" years of the past. [New article and charts by my colleague Veronika Samborska and I: ourworldindata.org/global-tempe... ]

I really liked this idea of using a histogram as a legend in a choropleth map (since land isn't unemployed; people are), so I made a little guide to doing it with #rstats, {ggplot2}, and {patchwork} www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/02...

We ( @joshnicholas.com and I ) have just finished a big re-design of our poll tracking page. The redesign had two goals 1) improve the clarity of the summary charts and 2) de-emphasise the mean, and add emphasis on the credibility range/uncertainty of the modelling...

"Writing is thinking" Read this interview: www.chronicle.com/newsletter/t...

How can helping people think with data benefit society? Explore the research of Alex Kale (@kalealex.bsky.social), Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at the University of Chicago! www.youtube.com/shorts/8SkXI...

🏙️ Chicago friends! I will be in your city soon, talking about the end of the universe! Come join me and take your mind off your troubles by contemplating ultimate cosmic destruction instead! 🌌💥 astrophysics.uchicago.edu/events/event...

This is VERY good news. Love bookshop.org and all the stuff they do! www.salon.com/2025/01/28/b...

#info+ 2025 conference announced!! informationplusconference.com/2025/

Tues 2/11! Join us for a FREE online lecture, Design Pioneers: African American Graphic Designers You Should Know with Glenford Laughton, founder of Laughton Creatves. Free to attend: letterformarchive.org/shop/design-...

Anyone know how to turn off the AI assistance feature in Overleaf? I didn’t want this. I didn’t consent to this. I find the suggestions distracting in a way that basically makes the tool unusable for deep work. Am I alone in feeling this way?

Love this approach from the @nytimes.com where you can pick which of three forecasts to view - nice way of communicating uncertainty by getting readers to interact. How Much Snow Will Fall Where You Live? (gift link!) www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Crowdsourced Think-aloud Studies w/ full interaction provenance+rehydration, auto voice transcription, and correlation between timelines. That plus a pile of new features and capabilities in the reVISit 2.0 release. Check it out & let us know what you think!

My 4-page 📊 spread for the Feb issue of @sciam.bsky.social is now live in digital format! I take a look at everyone who has been to space or earned their astronaut wings. www.scientificamerican.com/article/ever... Constructive feedback is welcome. This was a labor of love & I'm very proud of it.

Experiment #1 (video): Delaunay triangulation and Voronoi tessellation for geometric artistry in #p5js #creativecoding #generativeart

Is it possible to establish consensus in interpreting the probability of an individual event? How far does exchangeability get us toward reconciling frequentist vs personalist (eg Bayesian) views? Summarized part of Dawid's "On Individual Risk" here: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/01/17/h...

This map will update with more neighborhood results as the year goes by. Right now, it represents 73 percent of all 2024 votes cast. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Trying 6 jitter methods for my 2024 authentication codes. Rectangular grid, hexagonal grid and beeswarm, with and without smoothing (x-dimension jitter to reduce spikes). #dataviz

🧵1/11 It's that time of year again and I am sharing some of my favourite graphics/maps from 2024. Starting with an animation showing Russia's progress on the eastern front. Ukraine's Kursk incursion failed to divert Russian resources as hoped. ft.com/content/4351... #dataviz

Day 18 #30DayMapChallenge I 3D-printed John Snow's 1854 cholera map of Soho. It took ages.

Just pushed a Christmas update to {ggblanket}. I decided to support colour blending. It uses {ggblend} under the hood (thanks @mjskay.com), which uses graphics features developed by Paul Murrell. Give {ggblanket} and {ggblend} a star, if you find them useful. Oh, and have a merry Christmas #rstats

This is such a fun project!

Collaborative color! 🎨 📊

Being an HCI researcher is not easy! It was nice hosting a panel at UChicago CS and hearing from our kind faculty members about cultivating culture, volunteering, dealing with failure, and more.

Join us for people and technology seminar on Friday with a fun group and topic! Thanks @tengshanyuan.info for coming up with this one!

WOAH! @fossheim.bsky.social has just published the single-best piece I've *ever* seen on how to apply principles of accessibility to data visualization. My jaw is on the floor. Seriously, if you only ever read a single thing for accessible visualization, let it be this: fossheim.io/writing/post...

Please volunteer for the VIS 2025 PC!

I am recruiting a postdoc! The research emphasis is participatory design for decision-making interfaces. Check out the two project descriptions on my website. people.cs.uchicago.edu/~kalea/prosp... The position is through UChicago’s Data Science Institute. datascience.uchicago.edu/research/pos...

Here you go. 🫡 Please share widely to help develop the dataviz community of Bluesky. 📊 go.bsky.app/R3nSyyy

I teach a class on data science here at Illinois and during the seminar I host a competition for the class called "The Hunt for the Worst Data Visualization." This was my most popular post on Xitter, so reproducing some of the best submissions from previous years here:

I made a data visualization academics starter pack! go.bsky.app/wzjzNi Let me know who I should add. #datavis

Have experience w/ a #dataviz grad program or research? Head over to the @datavizsociety.bsky.social slack for our discussion on "Applying For Data Viz PhDs"! Happening all week in the dvs-topics-in-data-viz channel. Contribute your two cents! www.datavisualizationsociety.org/slack-commun...

Visualizing how daylight hours change through the year depending on your latitude, for a blog post where I tried to figure out how far you'd need to travel to keep the same day length year-round (spoiler: not very far at first, then REALLY far at each equinox) www.aazuspan.dev/blog/chasing...

Reminder that the blog is here too! @statmodeling.bsky.social Please repost 🙏

Reposting this starter pack in light of the recent influx go.bsky.app/851zVkg