Evan Peck

After interviewing people impacted by wildfires in Colorado, Kate was deeply unsatisfied with any graph or chart capturing wildfire data. I love seeing her MS work with me on experiential data through ceramics highlighted by our college. www.instagram.com/reels/Dez0AL...

I get invited to many things around the U.S. and often need to check loss of trans rights to assess safety, rights, and replies. To help, I converted the curated content at translegislation.com into a map 2022-2026 map of rights loss. (It's not an accident that it looks like pox on America).

I'm jealous of people who can sit down and review a paper in one sitting. It takes me multiple days and multiple passes to make sure that yesterday-Evan wasn't an annoying grump.

You know your job responsibilities have changed over time when algorithms start recommending "Robert's Rules of Order"

Pushing my lab to create a PCS entry FAR earlier than usual.

The chart gods continue to bless my course with new examples of vis-rhetoric just before I talk about it in class.

The em dashes were a clear giveaway.

I'm realizing that AI has ruined my attitude towards modern, clean design styling. Bring me back to the Comic Sans era at this point - sprinkle in an animated "under construction" gif just to make me feel like I'm home again.

I have a request for anyone who helps organize or leads an ACM SIG, conference, etc. I'm chairing a task force on publication integrity in CS (clear-computing.org). Part of that work is surveying the community on tools used. If you can help spread the word to SIG/conf leaders, please do.

end of an era. the lesson one should not take from this is that human annotation/labeling is over, but the players have changed. scale, surge, companies that work at larger scale, have taken over.

I miss many social media interactions I had when I was very active, but my appetite for posting has just slowly dwindled since the post-Twitter community fracture... not sure if that energy will come back. Also, I'm apparently like 2 months away from embarrassing old-guy Internet nostalgia posts.

This video of @hankgreen.bsky.social crashing out for 30 straight minutes over graph manipulation & rhetoric makes me feel very seen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSgD...

I travelled 27 hrs, fought endless visa issues to give this talk for our award-winning paper at #CHI2026. Your turn to show up 📍 P1, Room 112, Apr 15 (Wed), 12 noon. But why? I wish the didn't impact every knowledge worker. Sadly, it does, and we need to talk about it. 1/n

If you're interested in pursing a teaching-focused academic career in computing, make sure to check out the (online) workshop series that @peck.phd and I will be running in May!

After attending 10 of 11 @acm-sigchi.bsky.social CHIs from 2009-2019, I'm going for the first time in 7 years next week; now with a new rank, new institution, new lab, and new gray hairs. Feel free to send me a DM/email. I'm eager to reconnect with folks I haven't seen in too-long #chi2026

WTF does this mean, past-Evan?

Since I'm using Ziptable to share data in my own class, I made a small change a couple of days ago to make my instructor flow better You can now filter columns to reduce dataset size, share shorter links, or choose targeted exports (e.g. to Datawrapper) Orig 🧵 on Ziptable: bsky.app/profile/peck...

A quick update to ziptbl.com: you can now open shared data directly in @datawrapper.de! The video shows the full flow: load data into Ziptable > share the link > create a 📊 in Datawrapper As always: the data stays off any servers until you send it to Datawrapper - it's just compressed in the url

Holy smokes - thanks for all the ZipTable love! A small update: - 🗺️ GeoJSONs! Share geo data and open it directly in geojson.io (vid) - Better sharing guidance based on link length (email vs. Slack vs. SMS) - Faster! Only 65 KBs on 1st load now. Repeat visits are ~3.5 KB. That's dial-up modem fast 😂

Data/design folks, what is your favorite visual that focuses on the human cost of violence, tragedies and disasters? The most emotionally impactful visualization? The most visually striking? Please share! I'd like to get as many examples as possible.

It's (finally) getting easier to produce accessible PDFs with LaTeX in Overleaf: www.overleaf.com/blog/accessi...

Olympic medals are a good place to play with the Emojicon Creator I made last year: emojicon-creator.netlify.app 20 USA medals: 6 x 🥇, 9 x 🥈, 5 x 🥉: 🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇🥈🥈🥈🥈 🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥉🥉🥉🥉🥉 or 🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇 🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈🥈 🥉🥉🥉🥉🥉

I'm all for creating engaging visuals to capture attention, but I have mixed feelings about interactives that seem to use the visual language of charts to imply more data than is represented. I don't get much from the interaction, but maybe more people will read? 🔗 www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

An interesting 📊 choice from ESPN's Olympic medal coverage. By giving each country its own axis-range, the bar for USA's 8 silver medals is the same height as Norway's 12 gold. If you're trying to compare countries at a glance, USA's bars are all bit taller than they should be.

Two snowpack maps, similar data, very different vibes. In my vis courses, I always talk to my students about how color associations can manipulate the story of a visualization. This is a great, recent (and local!) example.

another look at this generational chart crime

I've been running a new vis course this semester that empowers students to invest in the vis tools, topics, practices that best align with their careers. Having a set of well-crafted resources like this to pass on is wonderful.

I lost my job, my kids have measles, and masked secret police roam our streets murdering civilians and abducting the witnesses. But at least now we have full sovereignty over a couple of military bases in Greenland.

(the game is currently 24-21 with 6 minutes left, and Toney has 115 yards)

Given its quality + faithfulness to source material, I'm still not over The Odyssey going to Christopher Nolan instead of the Muppets

NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇

If you can't find me, I'm the one home sick 😷. It has been such a great semester together, and we're excited to share some of our ongoing research next year with you!

the @data-and-design.org and information visions (@peck.phd) labs celebrated the end of the semester together yesterday! thanks for a great 2025!

#CHI2026 Student Mentoring Program is open for applications: chi2026.acm.org/authors/stud... with a brand new program: (1) CHI 101 (2) Building a Research Cohort (3) Dissertation Research Roundtable Deadline: 22 Jan! RT friends of @acm-sigchi.bsky.social @chi.acm.org

These are the kinds of example I love discussing with students. What does a city with 19.5%🔴 the workforce look like vs. a city with 20.1%⚫ of the workforce? 🤔 (I feel like I'm picking on the Economist a lot, but their charts consistently get promoted to me + glitch my brain)

I'll always donate part of my day to a good optical illusion, so here are a whole bunch of them: optical.toys

Not the first time that Anthropic has used truncated bar graph axes to visually exaggerate their performance vs competitors. 🔗 x.com/claudeai/sta...

This has been such a lovely way to start class in my vis course over the past few weeks.

Humans are bad at big numbers. Which makes it easier for billionaires (and trillionaires) to get away with hoarding wealth. Because most people just can't comprehend how much money that is. So, I appreciate this WaPo effort to help people visualize what ridiculous amounts of wealth really mean.

My new big visualization project is out: The Trans News Initiative, a collaboration between UM's School of Communication, the Trans Journalists Association, and Polygraph (The Pudding): transnewsinitiative.org Here's a piece about it in the Columbia Journalism Review: www.cjr.org/news/visuali...