Microsoft has patented sparklines in Excel and Edward Tufte is taking suggestions on what to do about it. The patent specifically mentions “sparklines in a grid”, evidently the patent is for sparklines attached to a cell not floating like standard charts in Excel (here is Microsoft’s blog post about the feature). I think this is a great capability for Excel, but I wonder how far-reaching this patent is?

UPDATE 09-28-2017: updated links to Microsoft post about sparklines.

Recently, I’ve been wanting to create some timelines for various projects of mine. I needed something fairly flexible and I wanted the timeline to be generated from an input file, not from source code or a GUI. I settled on MG_TIMELINE which accepts an XML input file and generates a PostScript output file (which I can then convert to PNG or PDF, depending on what I need). While MG_TIMELINE is not a finished solution yet, it does handle my needs fairly well now.

To run the main-level example program, just put all the required files in the !path and type:

IDL> .run mg_timeline

The input file contains a top-level timeline element which specifies the start and end dates as well as the tick interval:

If you want a vertical line at the current date, put in a now element:

Currently, there are three types of items to place on the timelines: event, interval, and activity elements. Examples of these elements from the athletic.xml file are shown below. Events are at a specific date:

!4GRUB!XBoulder, CO

The color name can be any of the HTML color names. The level attribute specifies the height of the text for the level where 0.1 is the bottom timeline axis and 0.9 is the top timeline axis (I trying to think of ways to make this friendlier). An interval is similar except it has start and end dates:

An activity element specifies some value for each time period of the timeline. Below is a weekly activity which starts on the 17th week, so the value for the 17-19th weeks is 5, 20-22 is 6, etc.:

5 5 5 6 6 6 7 7 7 8 8 8 9 9 9 10 10 10 11 11 11 12 12 12
13 13 14 14 14 15 15 15 10 10 10 5

It would be nice to add a sparkline visualization option for activities.

Here’s the source code, the data for the example, and the documentation. You will also need VIS_COLOR and its data. The output is available as a image or PDF.

Today’s xkcd, Movie Narrative Charts, shows the interactions between the characters through the timeline of a few movies. For example, a section from the Lord of the Rings chart:

Visualizations have appeared in xkcd before, such as the maps of the Internet and the web.

The University of Utah’s Genetic Science Learning Center has cell size visualization is reminiscent of the classic Powers of Ten video. It helps the user to compare the size of various types of cells (along with a few larger common objects). A slider adds interactivity, allowing the user to manipulate the scale.

Link via Kottke.

The Flickr as a Paintbrush post explains how geotagged pictures on Flickr were used to create a map of the predominant colors in a geographic bounding box. The process looks pretty easy, although a bunch of photos have to be downloaded (small sizes should be fine for this, though). I’m thinking of making one of these for Boulder; I’m sure the campus brick would stand out in a similar manner, but I bet there would also be “Flatiron viewing spots” showing up. How to take season into account?

Jorge Camoes has an article on his Charts blog about whether all the fancy points and rules about visualization are really worthwhile and can be used for general audiences. The conclusion is that audiences need to be educated slowly; a graphic intended for everyone needs to tend towards eye candy rather than a sophisticated presentation of data:

If a single chart can save the world, it will not be a Few’s or Tufte’s 100% compliant chart. It will be a glossy Xcelsius pie chart. (Wow, that’s depressing…)

I’ve heard NY Times graphics people say repeatedly that they can’t put a scatter plot in the NY Times because people don’t understand them, even though a scatter plot is probably the single most useful type of graphic. Jorge continues:

Here is my Pandora box: give the audience what it expects and understands, even if that hurts your data visualization soul (OK, give it 90% of what it expects and use the remaining 10% to educate it.)

There is an interesting back and forth in the comments as well.

Henry Markram’s TED talk shows how high-performance computing (including many excellent visualizations) are being used to understand the human brain.

Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved – soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they’re made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain’s 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.

Link via datavisualization.ch.

The Visual Miscellaneum is a coffee table book of visualizations. The author, David McCandless, has a post on his site showing some photos of the book. McCandless writes about the book:

Overall though, I think it’s pretty good. Ultimately, I wanted to explore a whole range of subjects as visually and beautifully as possible, with the minimum of text. I hope I managed it and I hope you enjoy it.

You can pre-order now, it will be available in the US on November 10.

As it ends, I’m going to write-up some thoughts about each conference from VisWeek: VAST, Vis, and InfoVis. I certainly can’t include everything, but will try to post some links to the points that hit me the hardest.

The VAST keynote by Andrew Glassner was “Using Stories to Discover Patterns”. I believe his basic premise to tell stories with visualizations and he had a lot of good advice about story-telling in general, but I wish he had some example visualizations which succeeded because they told a story.

Carlos Scheidegger at visualization, etc has a good write-up of the Spatio-temporal paper session.

Kwan-liu Ma’s students were everywhere doing interesting work.

The time-varying vector fields was great. Christopher Garth gave a useful introduction to the background material in this area, which was particularly useful to a outsider like myself. GPU-based approaches were discussed by Jens Krüger. Hank Childs also presented on large data.

The VAST capstone panel, “How Interactive Visualization Can Assist Investigative Analysis: Views and Perspectives from Domain Experts” was with Joe Parry, researcher in visualization systems for intelligence analysts; Lawrence Hunter from the OECD; and Sarah Cohen, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist now at Duke University. Joe Parry posted an outline of his thoughts (and also spoke with no slides, the only speaker I saw at the conference do that).

The Vis and InfoVis conferences end tomorrow, so hopefully I can post about them in the next few days.

I will be at VisWeek 2009 in Atlantic City next week:

IEEE VisWeek 2009 is the premier forum for visualization advances in science and engineering for academia, government, and industry. This event brings together researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in techniques, tools, and technology. Visualization has become an integral part in a wide array of application areas, and papers are solicited both for original visualization research and for the application of visualization towards the understanding of domain-specific data.

I’m hoping to post some updates about the conference next week.