In this unhinged rant, I lay out my suspicion that a lot of visualizations are bullshit: charts that do not have even the common decency to intentionally lie but are totally unconcerned about the state of the world or any practical utility. I suspect that bullshit charts take up a large fraction of the time and attention of actual visualization producers and consumers, and yet are seemingly absent from academic research into visualization design.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2109.12975,
title = {Towards a Theory of Bullshit Visualization},
author = {Michael Correll},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.12975},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Preprint of paper accepted to alt.VIS 2021 workshop https://altvis.github.io/