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Alexander Lex

@alex-lex.bsky.social
759 followers 399 following 84 posts

Data visualization researcher. Associate Prof of CS at the University of Utah. Lab website: vdl.sci.utah.edu. Co-founder of datavisyn: datavisyn.io

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Reposted by Alexander Lex
Dominik Moritz @domoritz.de · 16/09/2026
We are trying a big experiment this year for @ieeevis.org where we will have paper discussions hosted on @atproto.com. So look out for more activity in November.
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Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Vision science: The difference between Rod Stewart and Cone Stewart finally clarified
Two photos of the singer Rod Stewart, left: B/W labelled Rod Stewart; right: color, labelled Cone Stewart
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
The reVISit team is currently in Portland, Maine to work on version 3! It’s fun to come back to NorthEastern’s Roux institute – where we had our very first retreat to get reVISit started.
Group picture of the revisit team with 10 ppl.
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Helena Klara Jambor @helenajambor.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
You want to code your #biology #science figures? @alex-lex.bsky.social (mainly) and I have a few ideas for you. 🎁- link to our Nature Methods Points of View "Code to plot" #DataViz rdcu.be/fyill
rdcu.be
Code to plot
Nature Methods - Biologists can reuse, remix and vibe code scientific figures.
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
I wrote a blog post, “Beyond the Demo: Building Visualization Research Software That Lasts”, based on a keynote I gave at VisGap at EuroVis in Nottingham last month. It reflects on what it takes to build visualization software that survives beyond the paper. www.visdesignlab.net/blog/2026/07...
Illustration splitting projects into successes - datavisyn, reVISit, and UpSet; and failures - Caleydo and Multinet.
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Nature Methods @natmethods.nature.com · 14/07/2026
In our latest Points of View column, @helenajambor.bsky.social and Alexander Lex cover scientific web applications for creating biological data figures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Helena Klara Jambor @helenajambor.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
How scientists simplify their datavis with a few clicks - read more in **Click to plot** article, out in @natureportfolio.nature.com I love these resources, because I know they bridge the experimentalists journeying into advanced plots and coding eventually. Great collab @alex-lex.bsky.social
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Want to study how people interact with an AI? reVISit now supports LLM-based chatbots as first-class study components, with provenance tracking built in. We put together a demo and a step-by-step guide for adapting it to your own research. Check out the blog post at revisit.dev/blog/2026/04...
A screenshot of the demo study, showing a clustered heat map on the left and a chatbot on the right, where a user has asked to tell them about the chart and the bot has answered
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
V 2.4 of reVISit – our online user study platform – is out, and it’s all about speed and stability. There are new features, including the ability to specify a condition via the URL, but the focus was fixing bugs! You can read about the release on the blog: revisit.dev/blog/2026/02...
The study browser and the study card interfaces in reVISit with new features showing how conditions chosen via URL parameters are shown.
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Reposted by Alexander Lex
Niklas Elmqvist @nelmqvist.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
Reviewers want perfectly controlled experiments AND real-world ecological validity. But you can't have both, at least not in one study. New post on the validity tradeoff in HCI and what to do about it: niklaselmqvist.medium.com/you-cant-hav... (Spoiler: run two studies that complement each other.)
niklaselmqvist.medium.com
You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
The Validity Tradeoff in HCI Research
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
I'm excited to welcome the first member of the Visualization Design Lab @ TU Graz: Abhraneel Sarma. Abhraneel joins us as a PostDoc from Northwestern University in Chicago, where he just recently completed his PhD.
Portraet photo of Abhraneel Sarma
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
We’re excited to announce ReVISit v2.3, along with updates from versions 2.1 and 2.2. These releases introduce major new capabilities that make it easier to design, run, and analyze visualization studies. Check out what's new: revisit.dev/blog/2025/10...
A screenshot of the reVISit visit replay interface with the video of a visualization experiment on top, and a video-editor like menu at the bottom.
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Alark Joshi @alark.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
Revisit by @laneh.bsky.social and team is an excellent option. It requires some configuration and setup, but it works beautifully and all your data stays on your server. (revisit.dev)
revisit.dev
Home | ReVISit
reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
The reVISit team will be hosting an open hackathon at TU Graz in Austria, immediately after IEEE VIS from Monday November 10 to Wednesday November 13. Anyone interested in contributing to reVISit is invited to participate!
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
Can 3D-printed tactile charts help blind and low-vision users understand complex visualizations? Yes, and they are a preferred learning method. Read Tingying's blog post to see how it works and what we learned: www.visdesignlab.net/blog/2025/08...
lnkd.in
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
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Kerry Kole @merrykerry.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
"if we had a million pounds we could get a working robot in ten years" 1966 youtu.be/T282C7cjWwg?...
youtu.be
1966: ROBOT HOUSEKEEPERS Coming Soon | Tomorrow's World | Past Predictions | BBC Archive
YouTube video by BBC Archive
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
My new (and old) university TU Graz interviewed me about my return to Austria. Check it out; available in English and German. www.tugraz.at/news/artikel...
tugraz.at
Alexander Lex: Wie können Daten besser kommuniziert werden?
Alexander Lex beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie sich die Interaktion zwischen Mensch und Computer verbessern lässt – insbesondere in der Visualisierung und Accessibility.
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Nils Kroemer @nbkroemer.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
When I started @neuromadlab.bsky.social in 2017, we decided to publish all empirical papers as preprints. It helped us gain traction in the early days and avoid the kind of gate keeping of less convenient results. The benefits far outweighted any potential risk. I never regretted preprinting.
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Hendrik Strobelt @henstr.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
It's on! In its 8th year, the original VISxAI workshop wants your contributions for explaining ML/AI/GenAI principles. Please consider to submit. Deadline: July 30 webpage: visxai.io #ML #AI #GenAI #Visualization
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Andrew McNutt @mcnuttandrew.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
We all love upset plots (the best way to represent set data), but how do we make them accessible to everyone? To answer this we { @maggiemccracken.bsky.social, @alex-lex.bsky.social, and others } developed a system (and ran a bunch of studies) to figure it out! vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2025/06...
vdl.sci.utah.edu
Making Data Visualizations Talk: Accessible Text Descriptions for UpSet Plots
Data visualizations in scientific journals are essential for understanding the content of an article. However, visualizations typically are inaccessible for blind or low-vision users. A common remedy ...
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
If you're at EuroVis, join us for our reVISit tutorial tomorrow at 9 to learn about how to make powerful online user studies! diglib.eg.org/items/765579...
diglib.eg.org
Running Online User Studies with the reVISit Framework
There currently are two main approaches for running online user studies: experimenters can use commercial survey tools, which are easy to use but can be costly, hamper reproducibility, and have limita...
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Reposted by Alexander Lex
Robert Rohde @rarohde.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
~45% of US corn production is now used to make ethanol, mostly for mixing into gasoline. That's ~13% of all US crop land already used for energy production. Using some of the same land for solar panels would capture 50-100 times more energy per acre.
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
If you're curios about how reVISit can help you run your user studies, join us for a meetup at #CHI2025 tomorrow from 9:00-10:30 in Room G218! revisit.dev
revisit.dev
Home | ReVISit
reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
Maxim Lisnic is having a busy day presenting two #chi2025 papers on "guardrails against cherrypicking" and on "composing text in dashboard tools". Max is on the job market for PostDocs and academic positions. Talk to him if you're hiring! vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications... dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Max presenting at CHI
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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 23/04/2025
good vis design is a lot harder an optimization problem than the data-ink ratio makes it seem, and talking about it as if it were that simple has misled many people into confidently creating bad charts, including Tufte
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
After an incredible decade at the University of Utah, I’m happy to share that I’ll be returning to my alma mater, TU Graz, this fall as a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction. I’ll be hiring a PhD student and a PostDoc in Graz—if you're interested in HCI and visualization get in touch!
The clock tower of Graz and the city in the background.
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
Check out SCI's contributions to #CHI2025 this year, including two papers and a course from our lab. Can guardrails mitigate cherry picking in data explorers? vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications... Can you do Think Aloud studies on crowdsourced platforms? vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications...
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Going to #CHI2025 in Japan? Interested in running user studies? Sign up for our virtual CHI 2025 course that teaches you how to use reVISit, a new, open-source user study tool reducing the tedium of study design. Come learn through some practical examples. cvent.me/g5mx2w revisit.dev
A screenshot of the reVISit interface showing the answers and provenance from a participant who completed the question. The study shown is a replication of He et al.’s pattern design study.
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
It’s the time of the year when students accepted to graduate programs make decisions on where to go, while others might still be anxiously waiting to hear back. Unfortunately, the grad admissions process is opaque, so I’ve written a post that gives background: vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2025/04...
vdl.sci.utah.edu
Reading Between the Lines: The US Computer Science Graduate Admission Process
It’s the time of the year that prospective graduate students have to commit to a particular computer science graduate program. Those that got multiple offers are in the envious position to be able to ...
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Our World in Data @ourworldindata.org · 08/04/2025
Most of the world’s foreign aid comes from governments, not philanthropic foundations
A bar graph titled "More than 95% of foreign aid comes from governments, rather than private donors" illustrates the distribution of foreign aid in 2023. The left portion shows a large maroon bar labeled "Foreign aid from governments," reaching $232 billion. The right section features a smaller tan bar labeled "Foreign aid from private donors," indicating $11 billion. A note beside the tan bar states that 4.5% of foreign aid came from private philanthropic donors. The footnote specifies that "Private donors" refers to philanthropic foundations reporting to OECD and excludes many individual charity donations or private investments. The data source is attributed to OECD (2024) and indicates that the information is shared under a Creative Commons BY license.
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jonathan zong @jonathanzong.com · 31/03/2025
Tactile charts are an important tool for conveying data to blind and low vision people via embossed paper. However, tactile charts require high levels of time and expertise to design. Introducing Tactile Vega-Lite, new work at #CHI2025 led by MIT SM student Katie Chen news.mit.edu/2025/making-...
news.mit.edu
A new way to make graphs more accessible to blind and low-vision readers
Designed to help blind and low-vision readers understand graphics, the “Tactile Vega-Lite” system from MIT CSAIL converts data into a standard visual graph and a tactile chart. Accessibility standards...
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
Can you run a think-aloud study via crowdsourcing? Yes you can! We used reVISit for running and analyzing online TA studies. And yes, online participants do actually speak, though they’re more critical than lab participants. Check out the CHI paper: vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications... #datavis #chi2025
vdl.sci.utah.edu
Crowdsourced Think-Aloud Studies
The think-aloud (TA) protocol is a useful method for evaluating user interfaces, including data visualizations. However, TA studies are time-consuming to conduct and hence often have a small number of...
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
We're still looking for a few more participants!
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Reposted by Alexander Lex
Lane Harrison @laneh.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
1) Cool VIS study, 2) Help our replication effort! ->
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
How can we use black-and-white patterns in visualization? If you have visualization design experience, we’d love your input! We’re running a short study (less than 20 minutes) where you’ll experiment with designing patterns for a chart. Please participate here revisit.dev/replication-... Thank you!
Different visualizations - a map, a pie chart, a bar chart, using black and white patterns.
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Ursula von der Leyen @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu · 28/02/2025
Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people. Be strong, be brave, be fearless. You are never alone, dear President Zelenskyy. We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.
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Anthony Robinson @arobinson.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
Yeah, there is just a huge mismatch in type it seems. I also think a chat interface as a means to create a graphical output is always going to be a terrible fit. It's like driving a car with voice commands - beyond awkward. I don't think in sentences when I am designing a map... maybe others do?
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Scientific Computing & Imaging Institute @sci.utah.edu · 14/02/2025
Mark your calendars for this Feb. 27 discussion with Don Norman, a renowned expert in user-centered design and beyond. He's among the most cited researchers in the world. 🔥 Norman will be hosted by Vineet Pandey, one of the inaugural faculty fellows in SCI's One-U Responsible AI Initiative.
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CMU Data Interaction Group @dig.cmu.edu · 13/02/2025
Do you work with text data for your job or research? We’d love to talk to you! We're running a paid user study to understand how people explore and visualize text data while programming—and to gather feedback on our new open-source visualization tool. Details below 👇
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
reVISit 2.0 Highlight: reVISit now supports Vega and Vega-Lite stimuli. You have the freedom to plug in Vega JSON configurations inline, or as a file. You can leverage interaction and reVISit's provenance tracking and interaction replay feature as well, with no extra effort. revisit.dev #datavis
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Lane Harrison @laneh.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
ReVISit 2.0 (revisit.dev) reached several exciting milestones recently: 📁 You can now define an entire experiment in a single file— from trial data, stimuli (visualizations and interactions, thanks to Vega-Altair), study blocks/sequences and randomization, questionnaires, etc.
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Mark @mkeller7.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
We systematically analyzed the visualizations used in 1,846 subfigures from 45 human single-cell atlas publications in a survey on The State of Single-Cell Atlas Data Visualization in the Biological Literature. 📝: osf.io/preprints/os... 🔍: keller-mark.github.io/sc-star-site/
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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
I, for one, would like to see the legal analysis that explains what authority, if any, OMB has to restrict by memorandium the activities carried out under grants awarded under the NSF's established procedures.
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Jen Mankoff @jcmankoff.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
"All NSF grantees must [cease] all non-compliant activities... that [use] DEIA principles and frameworks" The EO asks that DEIA "discrimination programs" be terminated "to the maximum extent allowed by law." But it is illegal to fail at accessibility and to discriminate. I'll be obeying the law.
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
reVISit 2.0 Highlight: Simplify your study setup with reVISit libraries! Effortlessly integrate common tasks such as color-blindness tests, visual literacy tests, and a variety of Vis and HCI questionnaires into your study with just two lines in your study setup. revisit.dev #datavis
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
reVISit 2.0 Highlight: Introducing reVISitPy: reVISit Python Bindings. Generate complex reVISit studies, preview running studies, and analyze study data, **all** from within Python! revisit.dev #datavis
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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 24/01/2025
One of my students is currently using this to build an online study (with some custom interactive components) and it's great!
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
We’re released reVISit 2.0, the latest version of our open user study platform! There are a LOT of awesome new things in this release that will not only make it easier to run your user study for #ieeevis, but give you new analysis capabilities. #datavis www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjP3...
youtube.com
Replay with provenance in reVISit
YouTube video by Visualization Design Lab
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Andrew McNutt @mcnuttandrew.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
My new lab is running its first study! Its a little (paid) interview study about data serialization formats (like yaml, json, and friends). Do you have opinions? We'd love to hear them
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Lane Harrison @laneh.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Still buzzing about the progress the team has made on reVISit over this workshop. Looking forward to sharing new features for creating & instrumenting vis experiments in our upcoming 2.0 release 👀
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