Michael Correll
57 papers 608 citations h-index 9 2011–2026
Heuristics for Supporting Cooperative Dashboard Design
Dashboards are no longer mere static displays of metrics; through functionality such as interaction and storytelling, they have evolved to support analytic and communicative goals like monitoring...
Visual Stenography: Feature Recreation and Preservation in Sketches of Noisy Line Charts
Line charts surface many features in time series data, from trends to periodicity to peaks and valleys. However, not every potentially important feature in the data may correspond to a visual...
Complexity as Design Material
Complexity is often seen as a inherent negative in information design, with the job of the designer being to reduce or eliminate complexity, and with principles like Tufte's "data-ink ratio" or...
Data Guards: Challenges and Solutions for Fostering Trust in Data
From dirty data to intentional deception, there are many threats to the validity of data-driven decisions. Making use of data, especially new or unfamiliar data, therefore requires a degree of...
When the Body Became Data: Historical Data Cultures and Anatomical Illustration
With changing attitudes around knowledge, medicine, art, and technology, the human body has become a source of information and, ultimately, shareable and analyzable data. Centuries of...
The Many Tendrils of the Octopus Map
Conspiratorial thinking can connect many distinct or distant ills to a central cause. This belief has visual form in the octopus map: a map where a central force (for instance a nation, an...
Untidy Data: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Tables
Working with data in table form is usually considered a preparatory and tedious step in the sensemaking pipeline; a way of getting the data ready for more sophisticated visualization and...
Teru Teru B\=ozu: Defensive Raincloud Plots
Univariate visualizations like histograms, rug plots, or box plots provide concise visual summaries of distributions. However, each individual visualization may fail to robustly distinguish...
Toward a Scalable Census of Dashboard Designs in the Wild: A Case Study with Tableau Public
Dashboards remain ubiquitous artifacts for presenting or reasoning with data across different domains. Yet, there has been little work that provides a quantifiable, systematic, and descriptive...
Fitting Bell Curves to Data Distributions using Visualization
Idealized probability distributions, such as normal or other curves, lie at the root of confirmatory statistical tests. But how well do people understand these idealized curves? In practical...
Recommendations for Visualization Recommendations: Exploring Preferences and Priorities in Public Health
The promise of visualization recommendation systems is that analysts will be automatically provided with relevant and high-quality visualizations that will reduce the work of manual exploration or...
OSCAR: A Semantic-based Data Binning Approach
Binning is applied to categorize data values or to see distributions of data. Existing binning algorithms often rely on statistical properties of data. However, there are semantic considerations...
Are We Making Progress In Visualization Research?
In this work, I use a survey of senior visualization researchers and thinkers to ideate about the notion of progress in visualization research: how are we growing as a field, what are we building...
Surfacing Visualization Mirages
Dirty data and deceptive design practices can undermine, invert, or invalidate the purported messages of charts and graphs. These failures can arise silently: a conclusion derived from a...
The Data-Wink Ratio: Emoji Encoder for Generating Semantically-Resonant Unit Charts
Communicating data insights in an accessible and engaging manner to a broader audience remains a significant challenge. To address this problem, we introduce the Emoji Encoder, a tool that...
Vis Ex Machina: An Analysis of Trust in Human versus Algorithmically Generated Visualization Recommendations
More visualization systems are simplifying the data analysis process by automatically suggesting relevant visualizations. However, little work has been done to understand if users trust these...
Why Shouldn't All Charts Be Scatter Plots? Beyond Precision-Driven Visualizations
A central concept in information visualization research and practice is the notion of visual variable effectiveness, or the perceptual precision at which values are decoded given visual channels...
Ethical Dimensions of Visualization Research
Visualizations have a potentially enormous influence on how data are used to make decisions across all areas of human endeavor. However, it is not clear how this power connects to ethical duties:...