3rd Wave Data Visualization
Understanding the convergence of tools, audiences and modes
This is a write up of my keynote from the 2018 Tapestry Conference (above). You can see the slides (from which I’ve derived many of the images below) with speaker notes here.
Imagine what it was like to do data visualization 30 years ago. It’s 1988 and you’re using Excel 2.0 for simple charts like pie charts and line charts, or maybe something like SPSS for more complicated exploration and Arc/Info for geospatial data visualization. Some chart types that have become rather ubiquitous, like the treemap, haven’t even been invented yet. But in 1988, Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information was already five years old.
Now, imagine what it was like to make data visualization 15 years ago. There was no D3, no Tableau, no ggplot or even Prefuse/Flare. If you wanted to do network visualization you might use the newly published Cytoscape though it was focused on bioinformatics. Geospatial options were more advanced, with ArcGIS providing more and more cartographic…
