What Killed Innovation?

I'd also argue that even if all else is equal, a flashy visualization is worse than a conventional one, as you generally do not want to draw attention to the presentation if your aim is to convey information.

I don't have time for cool or innovative visualization. Show the bar chart, give me higher or lower is better.

It's strange to expect continuous innovation in anything where outputs are measurable against clear, stable targets. Once you've achieved the target, what further effort is necessary?

It's like asking what killed innovation in the shape of wheels. The answer is that we're able to make nearly perfect circular wheels, and there is no more optimal shape for a wheel than a circle, so no further gains for new innovations to capture.

I thought the youtube link would be this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwIyd_gsGWA

I love data visualization but it very much reminds me of shred guitar playing, something I also use to very much love.

What non-guitar players are complaining about the lack of innovation in shred guitar playing? It is just not something that non-guitar players really care much about. Good shred vs bad shred is all going to sound the same to the non-guitarist anyway.

> I am hopeful that in my lifetime, the web will die.

I'd like to see the www go back to its roots as a way to share and browse documents, hyperlinked together. The web worked when it was just documents to render and click on links. It is terrible as an application platform.

It's been 30 years since JavaScript was invented. Imagine what we'd have today, if instead of making the WWW into this half-assed application platform, those 30 years of collective brainpower were instead spent on making a great cross-platform native application development and delivery system!

> An OS on an OS, in a document reader

Versus an interpreted language executed in a runtime running on a virtual thread of an OS running on top of a BIOS over a glorified calculator!? Insanity! Whatever happened to good old-fashioned pen and paper!?

There's nothing wrong with the model of delivering your software as a small program to run in a sandboxed browser environment. WASM, canvas, WebGL -- you can do nearly as much on the web as native nowadays, with a dead-simple deployment model. One of the only type of programs that's much harder to make in a web application is malware. Calling a modern browser a "networked document reader" is as silly as calling a modern computer a calculator.

> Native apps can do literally anything.

That's just as much a downside as an upside. You're putting a lot of trust in a native app that you aren't putting in a website.

In HN spirit / guidelines, I'm going to presume the best.

Did you mean: "the web (as an application platform) will die" / once again swing back from mainframe / thin client to powerful local computing platforms?

In the spirit of empowering the user, I too hope the average user once again owns their destiny, the storage, computation, and control of their data. Though I think the web as a publishing media does empower that user if there are open platforms that promote the ability to choose any fulfillment partner they desire.

The web is just a convention that gained rapid adoption so now browsers dominate software. As far as conventions go, it is not bad compared to some of the stuff humans have landed on. Better than paving over everything so we can drive and park cars all over, better than everything being single use and disposable. Web has it's ups and downs but it is decent based on our track record.

I am exploring an alternative browser-like platform concept that would allow for near native performance. However established web protocols are hard to overcome.

Stagnation in viz design has pretty much nothing to do with the shrinking native<->web capability gap, and the web is here to stay.

Same here, although most of my UI work is on the Web nowadays, I miss the days when the browser was only for hypertext documents, and everything else was done natively with networking protocols, and standards.

Hence why my hobby coding has nothing to do with Web technologies, Web pays the bills, other stuff is for fun.

Data literacy should come down to the data itself, not only the visualization of those data. Sure pie charts are the bane of Tufte’s existence but even the best data visualizations of a particular segment of data can be misleading due to misrepresentation of the data underneath from collection to its analysis.

People should be far more skeptical of what they are fed. Data narratives are often misleading with manipulation of the data, its aggregation, visualization, and especially the interpretation within context. Data literacy needs to address all of these, not simply the how it’s visualized; that’s simply the final step in the entire data and information lifecycle.

I’m not saying “do your own research;” instead, folks should think critically about what they’re seeing and attempt to understand what’s presented and put it inside the appropriate context before taking anything at face value that they’re shown, by any organization.

e: just formatting

> nonzero axis is borderline fraud

This is an outrageously reductive meme that has long outstripped its actual usefulness and needs to die. The axis and scale should represent the useful range of values. For example, if your body temperature in Fahrenheit moves more than 5 degrees in either direction, you're having a medical emergency, but on a graph that starts from zero, this would barely be visible. Plotting body temperature from zero would conceal much more than it reveals, which is the opposite of what dataviz is supposed to do.

Pie charts are just as unreadable for medium and small percentages. They encode values as angles. Human perception is not suited to estimating angles relative to each other.

"From jean vests to jean jackets"

> Why is Florida at the top?

As you mention, the number of electors per state varies by quite a bit. E.g., in the 2012 election covered by the chart, Florida had 29 electors, Ohio had 18 electors, and North Carolina had 15 electors, which is why those three states appear at the top.

The main important effect is that (with only some small exceptions) if a candidate wins a simple majority of the votes in a state, then they receive all of that state's electors. E.g., if a candidate wins 50.01% of the Florida vote, they get 29 electors, but if they win 49.99% of the vote, they get 0 electors. See: the 2000 election, where the overall outcome depended on a few hundred votes in this way.

This means there's a lot of focus on 'flipping' states one way or the other, since their electoral votes all come in blocks. What the chart is showing is that if Romney won Florida, he could afford to lose a few other contested states and still win the national election. But if Obama won Florida (as he in fact did), then Romney would need every other state to go his way (very unlikely!) if he still wanted to have a chance.

That is to say, Florida really was extremely important, given the structure of U.S. presidential elections: it would make or break a candidate's whole campaign, regardless of what happened in the rest of the country. And similarly, the remaining states are ordered by decreasing importance.

Of course, while results are being counted, you also see simpler diagrams of the current situation. The classic format is a map of the country with each state colored red or blue depending on which way it flips. This is often accompanied by a horizonal line with a red bar growing from one side, a blue bar growing from the other side, and a line in the middle. But people are interested in which states are more important than others, which creates the imagery of 'paths to win'.

The US news covers the US elections from a really strange angle. They act as though even as the votes are coming in, and there is nothing more the candidates can do to change the outcome, that they are still "looking for a path to victory" and they list all of the "paths to victory" that could be possible. As though we're watching them stumble through a dark forest.

Have we already achieved the absolute optimal ways to visualize data? Maybe in some simple cases, yes, but not necessarily in all practical cases.

Should new and better ways to visualize data look drastically different from what we're used to? Maybe, but likely not very often. Revolutionary changes are rare, and incremental improvements are important.

Exactly. I see a lot of graphs and animations that look cool but when you take a closer look, they convey not much information .

Every example in the article suffers from excessive visual complexity and a lack of clarity as to what's being quantified and how values relate to each other.

The best one is the "four ways to slice the budget" visualization, but even that would just have been better as four separate, straightforward charts.

I guess what killed innovation in data visualization is that the innovations were hindering, rather than helping, to accomplish the purpose of building data visualizations.

Sometimes something is a "solved" problem. There hasn't been a lot of innovation in say, firearms, because we pretty much figured out the best way to make a gun ~100 years ago and there isn't much to improve.

Not everything needs innovation, and trying to innovate anyway just creates a solution in search of a problem.

My irrational side really laments where many parts of modern life are in this process and how...standardised things have become. When I look at e.g. old camera designs, they are so much more exciting to see evolve, and offer so many cool variations on "box with a hole and a light sensitive surface in it". Seeing how they experimented and worked out different ways to make an image-making machine with that requirement, I feel like I'm missing out on a period of discovery and interesting development that now is at a well-optimised but comparatively homogenous dead end.