Report: VisWeek updates by Jérôme Cukier: Day 5

On the capstone talk by nyt graphic designer Cox, among others. Take home: with annotations, familiarity matters less. 

VisWeek updates by Jérôme Cukier: Day 5

Day Five – Thursday 26th October

Remarkable Presentations

Georgia Albuquerque and colleagues from TU Braunschweig presented an incredible tool in a paper called “Synthetic Generation of High-Dimensional Datasets”. The tool and the accompanying paper are available here. Simply put, what this does is let a user “paint” a dataset with a few mouse strokes. Let’s suppose you want a dataset with data following a certain pattern, or with certain correlations: with this interface you can easily generate data that approach the form you want. This is plotting data…. but in reverse.

In the applications section there has been two papers that I really liked. The first, ‘BallotMaps: Detecting Name Bias in Alphabetically Ordered Ballot Papers’, struck me as how visualization techniques can contribute actively to UK democracy. The authors, around Jo Wood, wanted to see whether the order in which names appear in a voting ballot have an influence on the voter ch...