This series of posts is a tour through of the design space of graph visualization. As I promised, I will do my best to objectively justify as many visualization decisions as I can. This means we will have to go slow; I won’t even draw anything today! In this post, I will only take the very first step: all we will do is think about graphs, and what might be interesting about them.

Say you are given a graph and are told: "Tell me everything that is interesting about this graph". What do you do? We visualization folks like to believe that good pictures show much of what is interesting about data; this series of posts will carve a path from graph data to good graph plots. The path will take us mostly through well-known research results and techniques; the trick here is I will try to motivate the choices from first principles, or at least as close to it as I can manage.

Facet is a Javascript library I’m writing, part of a research project on high-performance visualization and graphics on the web. It’s peculiar how historical accidents are opportunities in disguise. If everyone knew Lisp, and if Javascript and the WebGL shading languages were Lisp, Facet would be what everyone would write. But Javascript is no Lisp, and WebGL’s vertex and fragment programming languages aren’t Lisp either, and many people still don’t know about Lisp.

Last week’s VisWeek finished with Amanda Cox’s amazing capstone talk about the visualization work that goes on at the New York Times. As everyone in the room was rightfully being blown away by the incredible productivity of their graphics department, Tim Lebo asked: How many papers could NYT submit in 3 weeks?

This same sentiment echoed in the hallways after her talk. Now, I don’t know what this number is; but I know what it should be. It should be zero! NYT obviously has much to say about visualization, but there is an important distinction. I think it is important to not confuse the top-of-the-line visualization practices as seen in the NYT with what we do at VisWeek. Let me be more specific.

The VisWeek keynote is just over; the fast-forward and the first VAST session are now underway. There’s more VAST in the afternoon, and also what I think will be a great panel.

There is now a free iOS app where you can browse conference programs, including VisWeek. No more losing that little piece of paper with the program!

VisWeek 2011 starts tomorrow, with two workshops, three tutorials and the contest. Having helped organize the workshops program, I’m obviously biased on the matter. Come attend the workshops! They’re fantastic.

Nate Silver runs the incredible FiveThirtyEight blog, currently hosted by the New York Times. Recently, he collected data and ran an analysis on whether or not Hurricane Irene has received too much media attention. I took that data and created some simple plots, here.