awesome-visualization-research

an interactive tool to animate the visual elements of a static picture

lessons that interface designers can learn from cartoonists

a study on the impact of different easing curves in animations

algorithm for automatically creating a visualization, given a dataset

a model for multiscale representations of data, enabling more scalable visualization techniques

in browser system that leverages the GPU for real-time interaction

specialized database system for visualizing spatiotemporal datasets

general visualization methods for large datasets

how can different color palette convey different emotions?

An overview of the CIECAM16 and CIECAM02 color appearance models, thought to be successors to the popular CIELAB model

detailed account of designing a better colormap for the popular matplotlib library

overview of designing color palettes in tableau

An attempt to model how color is perceived depending on form and viewing conditions of the visualization

Hunt's color appearance model, which was used as the basis for the Colorbrewer palettes

Comparative analysis of different color maps and rainbow scales

If a design goal is to produce colormaps that match people’s inferred mappings and are robust to changes in background color, it is beneficial to use colormaps that will not appear to vary in opacity on any background color, and to encode larger quantities in darker colors

a vision paper arguing why we should build wholistic systems thinking of visualization and user interaction from the very start

paper introducing the classic data cube

Hadley Wickham's paper on data cleaning and formatting

User study of edge bundling and compression techniques

survey paper focusing on large graph exploration and sensemaking, summarizes algorithms, visualizations, and interaction techniques

an algorithm for "bundling" edges on node-link diagrams, helps reduce visual clutter

an algorithm for producing graphs that look like they were drawn by a person

Paper validating "you draw it" visualizations and other modes of asking the reader for prediction input

a look at how latency in a user interface can affect user behavior and impact what they learn about datasets

model for understanding how users first experience an interactive

an overview of successes and failures in user interface tools, ideas for thinking about them, and thoughts on the future

Kosara's attempt to breakdown alternative narrative structures from the inverted pyramid suitable for data stories

Study of strategies for ordering visualizations in a narrative

Heer's attempt in 2010 to describe a shift happening in the use of visualizations toward what he calls "narrative visualization"

Discussion of scrollers and steppers and whether readers prefer a "flow" experience over something more static

Breakdown of rhetorical techniques in the framing of visualizations

An attempt to refine studies of visual encoding by including the task performed by the viewer when measuring visualization performance

The capacity of attention is limited. How does this limitation impact visualization?

Borkin paper that builds on her memorability study (in this section below) to investigate which components of a visualization are recalled after viewing

An evaluation of four perceptual tasks performed by audiences of data visualization

Classic Cleveland paper looks at the effectiveness of different graphical forms

An attempt to model how people make sense of information visualizations -- in particular unfamiliar visualization forms

An introduction to perceptual kernels: distance matrices derived from aggregate perceptual judgments. Essentially, a way of quantifying perceptual similarity scores among different visualization encodings

a study of "cognitive reference frames" for visualization and how people remember graphs symmetrically, even when the data is asymmetric

Charts with "embellishments" (sometimes called chart junk) perform better in memory recall weeks after viewing

Borkin study of more than 2,000 visualization types that investigates the features of visualizations that aid in memorability

Heer and Bostock paper using crowdsourced participants that validates its utility as a research tool

an overview of different types of information visualization papers, and common problems that researchers face

Evaluation of methodologies for measuring readers' grasp of uncertainty

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

User study of shading techniques in representing uncertainty

a Medium post explaining Hypothetical Outcome Plots (HOPs), an approach to visualizing uncertain data

Gelman's paper on how creators of statistical graphs can learn from the infovis community and vice-versa

Why the more visual comparisons an analyst makes, the more likely they are to find spurious patterns

a visual method for assessing the predictive power of models with binary outcomes

Evaluation of use of "Sketchy" visualizations to represent uncertainty

an adaptation of Bayesian surprise to generate better thematic maps. Unexpected events are visualized more prominently than those that follow expected patterns

User study of confidence bands, gradients and other techniques to show confidence intervals and uncertainty

Evaluation of strategies for real-time visualizations that communicate uncertainty

description of ggplot2 by Hadley Wickham

Investigation of the design of declarative, domain-specific languages for constructing interactive visualizations. Informs decisions in Vega and Protovis

a formal framework for representing design knowledge about effective visualization design as a collection of constraints. Can be used to build visualization recommendation systems

Discussion of how to effectively design software for information visualizations

an open source visualization grammar, enables other applications to build powerful abstractions on top of it

a high level visualization grammar for interaction, built on top of vega

Munzner's systems framework for thinking about visualization in terms of principles and design choices

Robert Kosara's study on reading accuracy with pie charts

Evaluation of visualizations that reveal other user's expectations around a dataset, like NYT's You Draw It results graphs

User study of different timeline styles (line, star, radial etc.)

Follow-up to Cleveland's 1984 study that looks closer at why and when bar charts are preferable

Cleveland study on dot plots over bar charts

Classic paper with ranked lists of how well people decode visual cues

Analysis of the use of isotypes as representations within the chart drawing space

Heer user study of time series area charts vs. horizon charts

Heer user study on the effective design of treemaps, followed up by later studies

In this paper Lee Byron & Martin Wattenberg introduce the streamgraph, a new type of stacked chart which was popularized by The New York Times

the sunburst chart is a radial alternative to a treemap

Kosara user study of the connected scatter plot

A metastudy of over 200 timeline designs

Shneiderman's treemap paper, where he describes the form initially

Exploration of ways to use type to construct visualization forms