There Is No Single View… – Jock D. Mackinlay and Chris Stolte argue that there is no “holy grail” of data visualization, and that to truly understand our data, we need multiple graphical views.
Seek or Show: Two Design Paradigms for Lots of Data – Ask a user what he wants or show him everything up front.
The Colbert Bump is Real, Colbert’s Nation Not What He Thinks it is – An analysis to show the true effect on books sales after an appearance on The Colbert Report.
Bullet Graphs for Not-to-Exceed Targets – A graphical widget becoming more popular in dashboards.
I like the “there is no single view” article, but I think it neglects to very important tools for understanding data – interaction and models. Interaction gives us linked brushing, which is a particularly flexible tool for comparing different subsets of the data. Models give us the capability to describe and remove strong trends in the data so we can see subtler effects that were previously masked. Tukey described this process as using residuals and re-iteration.
I also wonder about the use of other people’s software for all the bad examples, and their own for all the good examples. Can you do unbiased research while making money off of your software?