A curated list of data visualizations research papers, books, blog posts, and other readings. I aim to limit this to pieces that will be of interest to practitioners as well as academics. If you are looking for more practical tools and libraries see awesome-dataviz.
At present this list is very biased towards things @petulla or I are reading for personal research interests, but we gladly accept pull requests.
- Animation
- Automated Visualization Design
- Big Data
- Color
- Data Management
- Graphs
- Human Computer Interaction
- Narrative and Story
- Perception
- Research Methods
- Scientific Visualization
- Statistics and Uncertainty
- Systems, Toolkits, and Libraries
- Visual Forms
- Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface - lessons that interface designers can learn from cartoonists
- Temporal Distortion for Animated Transitions - a study on the impact of different easing curves in animations
- Automating the Design of Graphical Presentations of Relational Information - algorithm for automatically creating a visualization, given a dataset.
- Hierarchical Aggregation for Information Visualization: Overview, Techniques and Design Guidelines - a model for multiscale representations of data, enabling more scalable visualization techniques
- imMens: Real-time visual querying of big data - in browser system that leverages the GPU for real-time interaction
- Nanocubes: Fast visualization of large spatiotemporal datasets - specialized database system for visualizing spatiotemporal datasets
- Bin-summarise-smooth: A framework for visualising large data - general visualization methods for large datasets
- Affective Colour Palettes in Visualization - how can different color palette convey different emotions?
- Algorithmic improvements for the CIECAM02 and CAM16 color appearance models - An overview of the CIECAM16 and CIECAM02 color appearance models, thought to be successors to the popular CIELAB model.
- mpl colormaps: a better default colormap for matplotlib - detailed account of designing a better colormap for the popular matplotlib library
- How we designed the new color palettes in Tableau 10 - overview of designing color palettes in tableau
- Modeling Color Difference for Visualization Design - An attempt to model how color is perceived depending on form and viewing conditions of the visualization
- Revised color-appearance model for related and unrelated colors - Hunt's color appearance model, which was used as the basis for the Colorbrewer palettes.
- Somewhere Over the Rainbow: An Empirical Assessment of Quantitative Colormaps - Comparative analysis of different color maps and rainbow scales.
- The Case for Data Visualization Management Systems - a vision paper arguing why we should build wholistic systems thinking of visualization and user interaction from the very start
- Data Cube: A Relational Aggregation Operator Generalizing Group-By, Cross-Tab, and Sub-Totals - paper introducing the classic data cube
- Tidy Data - Hadley Wickham's paper on data cleaning and formatting
- Towards Unambiguous Edge Bundling: Investigating Confluent Drawings for Network Visualization - User study of edge bundling and compression techniques.
- Scalable Graph Exploration and Visualization: Sensemaking Challenges and Opportunities - survey paper focusing on large graph exploration and sensemaking, summarizes algorithms, visualizations, and interaction techniques
- Force-Directed Edge Bundling for Graph Visualization - an algorithm for "bundling" edges on node-link diagrams, helps reduce visual clutter
- HOLA: Human-like Orthogonal Network Layout - an algorithm for producing graphs that look like they were drawn by a person
- Explaining the Gap: Visualizing One’s Predictions Improves Recall and Comprehension of Data - Paper validating "you draw it" visualizations and other modes of asking the reader for prediction input
- The Effects of Interactive Latency on Exploratory Visual Analysis - a look at how latency in a user interface can affect user behavior and impact what they learn about datasets
- Exploration Strategies for Discovery of Interactivity in Visualizations - model for understanding how users first experience an interactive
- Past, Present and Future of User Interface Software Tools - an overview of successes and failures in user interface tools, ideas for thinking about them, and thoughts on the future
- An argument structure for data stories - Kosara's attempt to breakdown alternative narrative structures from the inverted pyramid suitable for data stories.
- Finding a Clear Path: Structuring Strategiesm for Visualization Sequences - Study of strategies for ordering visualizations in a narrative
- Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data - Heer's attempt in 2010 to describe a shift happening in the use of visualizations toward what he calls "narrative visualization"
- Visual Narrative Flow: Exploring Factors Shaping Data Visualization Story Reading Experiences - Discussion of scrollers and steppers and whether readers prefer a "flow" experience over something more static
- Visualization Rhetoric: Framing Effects in Narrative Visualization - Breakdown of rhetorical techniques in the framing of visualizations
- Assessing Effects of Task and Data Distribution on the Effectiveness of Visual Encodings - An attempt to refine studies of visual encoding by including the task performed by the viewer when measuring visualization performance
- Attention Capacity - The capacity of attention is limited. How does this limitation impact visualization?
- Four types of ensemble coding in data visualizations - An evaluation of four perceptual tasks performed by audiences of data visualization.
- Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods - Classic Cleveland paper looks at the effectiveness of different graphical forms
- How do People Make Sense of Unfamiliar Visualizations? - An attempt to model how people make sense of information visualizations -- in particular unfamiliar visualization forms.
- Learning Perceptual Kernels for Visualization Design - An introduction to perceptual kernels: distance matrices derived from aggregate perceptual judgments. Essentially, a way of quantifying perceptual similarity scores among different visualization encodings.
- Structure and strategy in encoding simplified graphs - a study of "cognitive reference frames" for visualization and how people remember graphs symmetrically, even when the data is asymmetric
- Useful Junk? The effects of visual embellishment on comprehension and memorability of charts - Charts with "embellishments" (sometimes called chart junk) perform better in memory recall weeks after viewing
- Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design - Heer and Bostock paper using crowdsourced participants that validates its utility as a research tool.
- Process and Pitfalls in Writing Information Visualization Research Papers - an overview of different types of information visualization papers, and common problems that researchers face
- Why Evaluating Uncertainty Visualization is Error Prone - Evaluation of methodologies for measuring readers' grasp of uncertainty.
- Principles of high-dimensional data visualization in astronomy - this paper by Alyssa Goodman gives a good introduction to the concept of "linked views" (with the relevant history), and great more contemporary examples from domain sciences
- Displaying Uncertainty with Shading - User study of shading techniques in representing uncertainty
- Hypothetical Outcome Plots: Experiencing the Uncertain - a Medium post explaining Hypothetical Outcome Plots (HOPs), an approach to visualizing uncertain data
- Infovis and Statistical Graphs: Different Goals, Different Looks - Gelman's paper on how creators of statistical graphs can learn from the infovis community and vice-versa
- Investigating the Effect of the Multiple Comparisons Problem in Visual Analysis - Why the more visual comparisons an analyst makes, the more likely they are to find spurious patterns
- The Separation Plot: A New Visual Method for Evaluating the Fit of Binary Models - a visual method for assessing the predictive power of models with binary outcomes
- Sketchy Rendering for Information Visualization - Evaluation of use of "Sketchy" visualizations to represent uncertainty
- Surprise! Bayesian Weighting for De-Biasing Thematic Maps - an adaptation of Bayesian surprise to generate better thematic maps. Unexpected events are visualized more prominently than those that follow expected patterns
- The Perception of Visual Uncertainty Representation by Non-experts - User study of confidence bands, gradients and other techniques to show confidence intervals and uncertainty
- When (ish) is My Bus? User-centered Visualizations of Uncertainty in Everyday, Mobile Predictive Systems - Evaluation of strategies for real-time visualizations that communicate uncertainty
- A Layered Grammar of Graphics - description of ggplot2 by Hadley Wickham.
- D3: Data Driven Documents
- Declarative Language Design for Interactive Visualization - Investigation of the design of declarative, domain-specific languages for constructing interactive visualizations. Informs decisions in Vega and Protovis.
- Software Design Patterns for Information Visualization - Discussion of how to effectively design software for information visualizations.
- Vega - an open source visualization grammar, enables other applications to build powerful abstractions on top of it
- Vega Lite - a high level visualization grammar for interaction, built on top of vega
- Visualization Analysis and Design - Munzner's systems framework for thinking about visualization in terms of principles and design choices.
- Draco - a formal framework for representing design knowledge about effective visualization design as a collection of constraints. Can be used to build visualization recommendation systems.
- Arcs, Angles, or Areas: Individual Data Encodings in Pie and Donut Charts - Robert Kosara's study on reading accuracy with pie charts.
- Data Through Others’ Eyes: The Impact of Visualizing Others’ Expectations on Visualization Interpretation - Evaluation of visualizations that reveal other user's expectations around a dataset, like NYT's You Draw It results graphs.
- Evaluation of Alternative Glyph Designs for Time Series Data in a Small Multiple Setting - User study of different timeline styles (line, star, radial etc.).
- Four Experiments on the Perception of Bar Charts - Follow-up to Cleveland's 1984 study that looks closer at why and when bar charts are preferable
- Graphical Methods for Data Presentation: Full Scale Breaks, Dot Charts, and Multibased Logging - Cleveland study on dot plots over bar charts
- Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods - Classic paper with ranked lists of how well people decode visual cues.
- ISOTYPE Visualization Working Memory, Performance, and Engagement - Analysis of the use of isotypes as representations within the chart drawing space
- Sizing the Horizon: The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Graphical Perception of Time Series Visualizations - Heer user study of time series area charts vs. horizon charts.
- Perceptual Guidelines for Creating Rectangular Treemaps - Heer user study on the effective design of treemaps, followed up by later studies
- Stacked Graphs – Geometry & Aesthetics - In this paper Lee Byron & Martin Wattenberg introduce the streamgraph, a new type of stacked chart which was popularized by The New York Times.
- Sunburst Chart - the sunburst chart is a radial alternative to a treemap
- The Connected Scatterplot for Presenting Paired Time Series - Kosara user study of the connected scatter plot.
- Timelines Revisited: A Design Space and Considerations for Expressive Storytelling - A metastudy of over 200 timeline designs.
- Tree-Maps: a space-filling approach to the visualization of hierarchical information structures - Shneiderman's treemap paper, where he describes the form initially
- Using Typography to Expand the Design Space of Data Visualization - Exploration of ways to use type to construct visualization forms
- Please check for duplicates first.
- Submit a PR with a small justification for the inclusion.
Thanks for your suggestions!
MIT