Publications (29)
Are We Making Progress In Visualization Research?
Michael Correll
In this work, I use a survey of senior visualization researchers and thinkers to ideate about the notion of progress in visualization research: how are we growing as a field, what…
Untidy Data: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Tables
Lyn Bartram, Michael Correll, Melanie Tory
Working with data in table form is usually considered a preparatory and tedious step in the sensemaking pipeline; a way of getting the data ready for more sophisticated visualizati…
"Trust Junk" Leads to Unjustified Support for Highly Discriminatory Predictive Models
Michael Correll, Lucy Havens, Mahsan Nourani
The paper shows that adding accurate but irrelevant data to model explanations can cause people to over‑trust and positively view discriminatory predictive models, highlighting ris…
Surfacing Visualization Mirages
Andrew McNutt, Gordon Kindlmann, Michael Correll
Dirty data and deceptive design practices can undermine, invert, or invalidate the purported messages of charts and graphs. These failures can arise silently: a conclusion derived…
Vis Ex Machina: An Analysis of Trust in Human versus Algorithmically Generated Visualization Recommendations
Rachael Zehrung, Astha Singhal, Michael Correll +1
More visualization systems are simplifying the data analysis process by automatically suggesting relevant visualizations. However, little work has been done to understand if users…
When the Body Became Data: Historical Data Cultures and Anatomical Illustration
Michael Correll, Laura A. Garrison
With changing attitudes around knowledge, medicine, art, and technology, the human body has become a source of information and, ultimately, shareable and analyzable data. Centuries…
Toward a Scalable Census of Dashboard Designs in the Wild: A Case Study with Tableau Public
Joanna Purich, Arjun Srinivasan, Michael Correll +3
Dashboards remain ubiquitous artifacts for presenting or reasoning with data across different domains. Yet, there has been little work that provides a quantifiable, systematic, and…
Complexity as Design Material
Florian Windhager, Alfie Abduhl-Rahman, Mark-Jan Bludau +5
Complexity is often seen as a inherent negative in information design, with the job of the designer being to reduce or eliminate complexity, and with principles like Tufte's "data-…
"The Worst Weather In America": Augmenting the Information Design of Extreme Cold Weather Forecasts
Michael Correll, Jay Broccolo, Drew Bush
Mount Washington is home to extreme, and extremely volatile, weather conditions. Consulting a weather forecast of conditions at the summit is vital for making one's visit as safe a…
OSCAR: A Semantic-based Data Binning Approach
Vidya Setlur, Michael Correll, Sarah Battersby
Binning is applied to categorize data values or to see distributions of data. Existing binning algorithms often rely on statistical properties of data. However, there are semantic…
Data Guards: Challenges and Solutions for Fostering Trust in Data
Nicole Sultanum, Dennis Bromley, Michael Correll
From dirty data to intentional deception, there are many threats to the validity of data-driven decisions. Making use of data, especially new or unfamiliar data, therefore requires…
Should We Dangle a Carrot? The Effect of Performance-based Incentives in Visualization Experiments
Abhraneel Sarma, Matthew Kay, Sheng Long +2
A perennial research question in visualization involves identifying which visual encodings for a particular dataset are most effective for users in performing a specific task. The…
What Do We Actually Learn from Evaluations in the "Heroic Era" of Visualization?
Michael Correll
We often point to the relative increase in the amount and sophistication of evaluations of visualization systems versus the earliest days of the field as evidence that we are matur…
The Many Tendrils of the Octopus Map
Eduardo Puerta, Shani Spivak, Michael Correll
Conspiratorial thinking can connect many distinct or distant ills to a central cause. This belief has visual form in the octopus map: a map where a central force (for instance a na…
Ethical Dimensions of Visualization Research
Michael Correll
Visualizations have a potentially enormous influence on how data are used to make decisions across all areas of human endeavor. However, it is not clear how this power connects to…
Towards a Theory of Bullshit Visualization
Michael Correll
In this unhinged rant, I lay out my suspicion that a lot of visualizations are bullshit: charts that do not have even the common decency to intentionally lie but are totally unconc…
Truncating the Y-Axis: Threat or Menace?
Michael Correll, Enrico Bertini, Steven Franconeri
Bar charts with y-axes that don't begin at zero can visually exaggerate effect sizes. However, advice for whether or not to truncate the y-axis can be equivocal for other visualiza…
Teru Teru BÅzu: Defensive Raincloud Plots
Michael Correll
Univariate visualizations like histograms, rug plots, or box plots provide concise visual summaries of distributions. However, each individual visualization may fail to robustly di…
Why Shouldn't All Charts Be Scatter Plots? Beyond Precision-Driven Visualizations
Enrico Bertini, Michael Correll, Steven Franconeri
A central concept in information visualization research and practice is the notion of visual variable effectiveness, or the perceptual precision at which values are decoded given v…
Illegible Semantics: Exploring the Design Space of Metal Logos
Gerrit J. Rijken, Rene Cutura, Frank Heyen +4
The logos of metal bands can be by turns gaudy, uncouth, or nearly illegible. Yet, these logos work: they communicate sophisticated notions of genre and emotional affect. In this p…
User Ex Machina : Simulation as a Design Probe in Human-in-the-Loop Text Analytics
Anamaria Crisan, Michael Correll
Topic models are widely used analysis techniques for clustering documents and surfacing thematic elements of text corpora. These models remain challenging to optimize and often req…
Heuristics for Supporting Cooperative Dashboard Design
Vidya Setlur, Michael Correll, Arvind Satyanarayan +1
Dashboards are no longer mere static displays of metrics; through functionality such as interaction and storytelling, they have evolved to support analytic and communicative goals…
Fitting Bell Curves to Data Distributions using Visualization
Eric Newburger, Michael Correll, Niklas Elmqvist
Idealized probability distributions, such as normal or other curves, lie at the root of confirmatory statistical tests. But how well do people understand these idealized curves? In…
A Priest, a Rabbi, and an Atheist Walk Into an Error Bar: Religious Meditations on Uncertainty Visualization
Michael Correll, Lane Harrison
In this provocation, we suggest that much (although not all) current uncertainty visualization simplifies the myriad forms of uncertainty into error bars around an estimate. This a…
Seeing Through the Forecast Clutter: Communicating Climate Forecast Distributions with Weighted Multiple Forecast Visualizations
Ruishi Zou, Siyi Wu, Racquel Fygenson +3
Forecasts often diverge because different models make varying assumptions to account for underlying uncertainty. Readers who consume forecasts may wish to survey the shape and spre…
Visual Stenography: Feature Recreation and Preservation in Sketches of Noisy Line Charts
Rifat Ara Proma, Michael Correll, Ghulam Jilani Quadri +1
Line charts surface many features in time series data, from trends to periodicity to peaks and valleys. However, not every potentially important feature in the data may correspond…
Recommendations for Visualization Recommendations: Exploring Preferences and Priorities in Public Health
Calvin Bao, Siyao Li, Sarah Flores +2
The promise of visualization recommendation systems is that analysts will be automatically provided with relevant and high-quality visualizations that will reduce the work of manua…
Charting the Moral Universe: Capturing Virtues and Values of Data Visualization Practice
Chloe Hudson Prock, Enrico Bertini, Michael Correll
What do we value in our visualizations, and in the people who design them? Despite a growing body of work on critical data visualization, the conception of what it is to do ethical…
The Data-Wink Ratio: Emoji Encoder for Generating Semantically-Resonant Unit Charts
Matthew Brehmer, Vidya Setlur, Zoe +1
Communicating data insights in an accessible and engaging manner to a broader audience remains a significant challenge. To address this problem, we introduce the Emoji Encoder, a t…