How do bats fly? What are the aerodynamic conditions around their wings? And how do you visualize all that? I did a short interview with David Laidlaw (PDF), who has collaborated with physicists, biologists, fluid mechanics experts, and others, to create a poster that won last year's NSF Visualization Challenge. The interview was done for American Scientist's Sightings column, which I have been invited to write.

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Jock D. Mackinlay was working on information visualization long before the field or the term even existed. His Ph.D. thesis on the automatic visual representation of data translated Bertin's semiological texts into a useful piece of software (and badly-needed visualization theory). His work also includes Cone Trees, the Perspective Wall, an analysis of the visualization design space, as well as the Readings in Information Visualization (together with Stuart Card and Ben Shneiderman). Mackinlay worked at PARC from 1986 to 2004, when he joined Tableau Software – a company based on a Ph.D. thesis inspired by his work 15 years earlier.

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What is a visualization? The word is problematic, and there have been very few definitions that try to define this field we are working in. More importantly: what is not a visualization? It is easy to argue that anything visual is a visualization in some way – but does that mean anything? Here is a definition of visualization and a few examples to illustrate the different criteria.

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When Al Gore talks about global warming, Hans Rosling shows the relationship between health and wealth, and the New York Times visualizes primary results and American consumer debt, they communicate visually. But they only use visual representation to get their point across, as a means to an end. When we want to show why visualization is effective, we have to care about the message, too – not just the method.

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I'm not generally a big YouTube fan. Sure, I've watched all the funny cat movies and seen people dump Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke. But little else has made me go there in some months. This has changed, though, with a new feature of the website: The YouTube Screen Room. Twice a month, four independent short films are added to the site, and the quality is amazing.

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This website just got a facelift and a few new features. I transitioned it to Drupal 6, and in the process redid the theme from scratch. While the changes are not huge, it does look a bit more modern. There are also a few new features to facilitate commenting and discussion.

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Colin Ware's latest book Visual Thinking for Design has a promising subtitle: active vision, attention, visual queries, gist, visual skills, color, narrative, design. That's covering quite a bit of ground, and also a lot of things not usually considered in visualization. While this is a book about design, I was interested in what it could teach people in InfoVis, and I review it from that point of view.

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My colleague Celine Latulipe has made a nice website about her Dance.Draw project. In what she calls Exquisite Interaction, three dancers wield inertial mice and thus control shapes in a projection behind them. The result is interesting and beautiful.

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I am looking for a designer to help me work on the icon for a program I am developing. The program is written for the iPhone and will be announced here once the iPhone AppStore is up (presumably at the end of June). Without going into details, let me tell you that it will be visualization-related, and that it will tie in with this website. If you feel that you could help, please contact me by the end of the week the latest (there is a first deadline next Monday).

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A paper on visualization criticism just appeared in the Visualization Viewpoints section of this month's Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A). Authors are yours truly, Fritz Drury, Lars Erik Holmquist, and David Laidlaw.

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