iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Check out Karen Schloss’s work! She’s a world expert on color semantics, and her group has done great vis research.

This has been the defining mode of public discourse for the last 10 years. I think we’re all sick to death of it.

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We were discussing the release of Claude Dashboard / Motion, which seem like bids to make visualization specialists obsolete (by algorithmically plagiarizing their labor). Imagine taking the time to learn front-end, design, stats, and data engineering---and then Anthropic eats your lunch. #datavis

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One of my students described the current moment as "two companies sucking the joy out of everything." 🎯 I've also heard AI described as, "the ultimate triumph of capital over labor," which is also 🎯

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I’m seeing a lot of this in peer review these days. It’s deeply frustrating.

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Yes, it’s a massive f***ing drag!

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Shout it from the rooftops! Demanding another person’s attention for work you didn’t do or think about is antisocial behavior. We need a new social contract in which this kind of gamesmanship is understood to be a cancer on whatever work culture it attempts to consume.

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I’m no advocate of gatekeeping, so I feel cognitive dissonance around this. I think it’s an example of how AI exploits human labor, not only in its training but in its use. We’re smothering the scientific enterprise and calling it progress, enabling bad actors to pull up the ladder of prosperity.

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I’ve seen many papers falsely claiming to have invented a new measure or benchmark. These are mostly confused echos of prior work. I think scientists need a way to absolve ourselves from giving them attention as if they were legitimate or good faith research efforts. The alternative is untenable.

Among the annoying writing habits of AI, the one that grates the most for me as a peer reviewer is renaming existing constructs and claiming them as an original contribution. Often, this feels to me like ChatGPT made an obvious distinction, called it a theory/framework, and the authors ran with it.

Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I like their explanatory figure #dataviz

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If this wasn’t a pattern of behavior, I would feel differently. But it is. This conference is broken and has been for years. Early career scholars in our field deserve a “top venue” that treats them with respect and dignity.

Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This is far from the first time CHI organizers have done things I disagree with that hurt authors. So much wasted time. So many forced choices between family and required service during the holidays. So many stupid policies. Past a certain point, it feels like an abusive relationship, not “benign.”

This is exactly the judgment that I’m worried about. How much does the person judging the reviewer’s expertise and what constitutes a reasonable rejection know about the area? Have they read the reviewer’s papers to know the kinds of things they’ve actually worked on in the past?

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This is frankly mob tactics. “Nice submission you have there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” I’ve been reassured by PC members that it won’t end up like this. The thing is we shouldn’t have to worry about this sort of thing at all.

The conference organizers have responded to scale with a coercive matching process for reviewers. This will result in lower quality reviews from people who’ve been pressured to review outside their expertise and threatens unjust desk rejections for people who try to hold the line on quality.

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Does anyone else think the ACM CHI reviewing process is so broken this year that it warrants some kind of collective action? An open letter? A boycott of the conference?

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This is deception of the interviewee and cannot be allowed to become widely established practice in journalism or research in general.

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The article focuses on speed of development in a way that seems to miss a huge part of the actual culture issue in frontier labs. He only alludes to it at the end when he talks about how they treat humanity. Maybe he’s too polite to call them sociopaths? Too complicit to condemn theft of IP?

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Cool paper! I wonder if the folks using AI to automatically replicate studies are thinking this hard about what replication rates actually measure.

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Becoming a “clout chasing professionalized neurotic” 😅😂

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Reposted by Alex Kale

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I combined my love of #datavis with a different passion -- the rich text of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh. The Torahmap places every verse of the Tanakh in a fixed spatial position, then plots overlays over it. You can play with it at torahmap.org

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I would be embarrassed to push a piece of software that lied to and defamed its users like this.

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This year looks like it will be awesome! How about those session names though? lol

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

We love data physicalization protest art. Also, this is really bleak 😞

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

What AI scales about science are the parts that are most broken and gameable. With the exception of combinatorial problems like protein folding, we need more thinking and less rote computation.

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I’m supportive of trying to reconstitute “vis twitter” here. I’ve been off of these platforms for years because I find them to be miserable and full of ideological bullshit. Bring back the nerd discourse!

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

This paper is being honored with a Best Short Paper Award at IEEE VIS 2025! I'm truly grateful for the recognition and looking forward to discussing this work at the conference. #ieeevis

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Decision theory informs us more about what to show than how to show (or how people interpret vis in practice), so I think theory building efforts need to synthesize it with theories of perception, cognition, and social/cultural dynamics.

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

My suggestion about using decision theory as a deductive framework during design studies is one path toward codifying what we know about decision context in ways that may be useful for making testable predictions about when a particular vis design is likely to be effective.

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Thanks Carlos, I didn't realize Gordon was on here. Your work on AVD was a huge inspiration for this paper. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the connects we draw between disclosure and AVD vulnerabilities.

Ultimately, this paper is about the epistemology of data communication. I close with reflections on how to develop a more robust logic of generalization about decision support, and how social norms demanding that research yield guidelines that transcend context are an obstacle.

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This work demonstrates the conceptual value of decision theory in visualization research and practice, and provides a primer for unfamiliar readers. My hope is that this will increase the adoption of ideas from decision theory in the visualization community.

I draw on decision theory to analyze the heterogeneity in decision problems that are studied by visualization research. By comparing examples, I call attention to the dimensions on which decision problems vary and when we can(not) expect results to transfer to different settings.

The dominant logic of generalization in visualization research (often implicitly) holds a strong assumption that efficacy of decoding is relatively context invariant, however, much modern research problematizes this assumption. Where does this leave us?

In visualization research and practice, we care a lot about supporting decision-making. However, it's not always clear how findings from empirical research generalizes to various decision contexts.

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Designing for Disclosure in Data Visualizations

This ambitious conceptual/theoretical work is Krisha's first paper and my first PhD-student led paper at UChicago. It's a big milestone for both of us, and I think she's done a wonderful job! Check out the paper and the talk at #ieeevis for more. arxiv.org/abs/2508.08383

arxiv.org

Visualizing data often entails data transformations that can reveal and hide information, operations we dub disclosure tactics. Whether designers hide information intentionally or as an implicit conse...

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Katie Sandlin @kmsandlin.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

I'm extremely excited to share this new paper out of the Data Cognition Lab! In it @krisha-mehta.bsky.social, Gordon Kindlmann, and I reframe visualization as a mechanism for data disclosure and develop a vocabulary for how visualization design induces loss on underlying data signals.

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Reposted by Alex Kale

Today, along with 2,000 other NIH employees, I had to clear out my office 😭 It was truly the honor of my life to work with such incredibly passionate people focused on improving human health. I’ve never experienced a more positive culture where *everyone* cared about their job and serving others.

Office desk without any personal items or decor

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

I wish more HCI research was this careful about measurement. If we do turn the corner, I think we’re gonna find out that a lot of our study results don’t mean what the authors originally said they meant.

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Thanks to the wonderful folks at @dsi-uchicago.bsky.social for making this video!

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

I also use that data set, but I ask students to encode all the variables in the table, which rules out a CDF because it doesn’t show the bacteria names. Unless they add the names with annotations. That could be cool. Avoiding occlusion and crowding would be a challenge.