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Matthew Kay

@mjskay.com

11K followers 1K following 1.6K posts

Assoc Prof Computer Science and Communication Studies at Northwestern. Infovis, HCI. Author of tidybayes & ggdist R pkgs. he/him. 🏳️‍🌈 https://mjskay.com/ Co-director https://mucollective.northwestern.edu Co-founder https://journalovi.org

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · Sep 7

I work in #datavis, best known for uncertainty vis: see my work on election forecast vis (forecasts.cs.northwestern.edu), this talk (youtu.be/E1kSnWvqCw0), or my lab (mucollective.northwestern.edu)

I like writing #rstats 📦s: ggdist (mjskay.github.io/ggdist), tidybayes, ggblend, posterior::rvar...

Some examples from the three main families of ggdist geometries: slabinterval, dotsinterval, and lineribbon

An example of an election forecast communicated using a quantile dotplot, from: Yang, Fumeng, Chloe Rose Mortenson, Erik Nisbet, Nicholas Diakopoulos, and Matthew Kay. "In Dice We Trust: Uncertainty Displays for Maintaining Trust in Election Forecasts Over Time." In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-24. 2024.

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 11h

would you say you're more a 75° or a 10°

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 11h

ohoho I used to follow a typography blog around when that pepsi rebrand happened and people just tore. them. apart.

Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 11h

omg I forgot about time cube!!! truly a golden era

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 18h

though this is more "can you eyeball about 10% of the mass being above water and the center of mass being in the middle so the thing doesn't move from initial conditions" which obviously doesn't tell you if it could have *formed* that way in the first place

an apparent iceberg above water and a bunch of squiggles under the water

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 18h

and also

(this is fun I'm getting pretty good at this)

another iceberg, looks more like the original

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 18h

okay but

iceberger game with an iceberg that's got a long vertical pointy bit under the water

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Reposted by Matthew Kay

Matthew Varona @matthew.wiki · 22h

Unreasonably excited to present THEORY IS SHAPES at alt.vis this November! Read on to find out what the "BLT Sandwich Theory of Visualization Consumption" (and other shape-based shenanigans) can teach us about theorycrafting in research 🥪🧲🧊♾️

Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 22h

to appear at #alt.vis 2025: THEORY IS SHAPES

sure "theory figures" are great, but @matthew.wiki, @maryamhed.bsky.social, me, and Carolina Nobre wonder: why always a 2D plane or a flowchart? why not icebergs, horseshoes, Möbius strips, or BLT sandwiches?
arxiv.org/abs/2510.01382

#ieeevis #hci

Abstract and teaser figure of the paper "Theory is Shapes" by Matthew Varona, Maryam Hedayati, Matthew Kay, and Carolina Nobre.

The teaser figure is an "iceberg" theory figure, showing four levels: the tip of the iceberg, containing a nested set diagram and a Cartesian plane. The next level down (just under the water) has a complicated flow charts and a combination flow chart and matrix. The next level down has the iceberg figure itself and a horseshoe. The final level contains a Möbius strip and a BLT sandwich.

The abstract reads:

"Theory figures" are a staple of theoretical visualization research. Common shapes such as Cartesian planes and flowcharts can be used not only to explain conceptual contributions, but to think through and refine the contribution itself. Yet, theory figures tend to be limited to a set of standard shapes, limiting the creative and expressive potential of visualization theory. In this work, we explore how the shapes used in theory figures afford different understandings and explanations of their underlying phenomena. We speculate on the value of visualizing theories using more expressive configurations, such as icebergs, horseshoes, Möbius strips, and BLT sandwiches. By reflecting on figure-making's generative role in the practice of theorizing, we conclude that theory is, in fact, shapes.

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 22h

also I gotta say @matthew.wiki and @maryamhed.bsky.social did a great job with this --- it's hilarious

(I can say this without tooting my own horn because with the exception of a single half sentence my direct contributions were in feedback not writing)

Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 22h

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 1d

The Confounders would 100% have started as a brother/sister twee-ish aughts indie folk band (think Iron & Wine meets Fiery Furnaces) and over decades shifted through baroque pop, post-rock, and 80s new wave revival to land on some strange edm mashup of like Kraftwerk and Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 1d

good call! or even "insquariance"?

hmm I see definite pedagogical advantages to squariance / rootsquariance / insquariance...

Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 2d

missed opportunity to rename all dispersion measures following the same scheme

OG variance = squariance
SD = stairiance (also known as rootsquariance)
Gini = fairiance
IQR = iquariance (pronounced with a schwa, like "aquarius")
MAD = marriance
precision = prairiance
etc

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 3d

ah yes, pull request check, perfect 👍

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Reposted by Matthew Kay

Evan Peck @peck.phd · 6d

omg - this alt.vis paper about NASA-TLX was styled like the original NASA-TLX paper 😍

arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24643

arxiv.org

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 6d

don't sell yourself short! I see lots of small touches that elevate it: pleasing (and colorblind-safe) colors, densities are lighter shades of corresponding intervals, interval lines are just-thick-enough-but-not-too-thick, y axis labels are stacked to match subgroups (+ all text horizontal), ...

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 6d

nice blorbs

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 6d

Yeah who knows, plus even if it has plateaued those numbers are still very high. I'd be surprised if it dropped in any meaningful way without some kind of widescale movement against it.

Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 6d

lolwut

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 6d

dunno about you but between the death of twitter and *waves hands* everything fucking else I've been consciously setting my phone down out of arms' reach and (for the first time in years) listening to an honest-to-god physical radio in the morning

Tony Tassell @tonytassell.bsky.social · 6d

Have we passed peak social media? @jburnmurdoch.ft.com here www.ft.com/content/a072...

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 6d

that's just German for "the p value, the"

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 7d

In either case it doesn't so much have a quibble as generate text that expresses a quibble

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 9d

fun! are we allowed to improve the chart?

that density estimator doesn't account for the boundedness of group C and it's usually possible to do better than random jitter

density + 50% and 95% intervals + mean + compressed dotplot with exact dot positions on three groups, including group C which is automatically estimated using a bounded KDE due to a lower bound.

library(ggplot2)
library(ggdist)

spreads |>
ggplot(aes(Group, Value, fill = Group)) +
geom_weave(
side = "left",
scale = 0.75,
alpha = 0.35,
binwidth = unit(1, "mm"),
overlaps = "keep",
color = NA
) +
stat_slab(
scale = 0.75,
alpha = 0.65,
color = "black",
linewidth = 0.25
) +
stat_pointinterval(
fill = "white",
shape = 23,
point_interval = "mean_qi",
.width = c(.5, .95)
) +
guides(fill = "none") +
labs(x = NULL) +
theme_minimal(base_size = 13) +
theme(panel.grid.minor = element_blank())

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Reposted by Matthew Kay

Gregg Gonsalves @gregggonsalves.bsky.social · 14d

I've been sitting with this piece of @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social for two days, reading it, re-reading it. You should too. #EzraKlein is the avatar of a new kind of liberal indulgence for the worst of the far-right, embracing bad-faith as a practice. www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review

Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

www.bostonreview.net

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Reposted by Matthew Kay

Dr. Julie Kientz @juliekientz.bsky.social · 29d

At @hcde.uw.edu, we will be hiring an Assistant or Associate Teaching Professor this coming year! Timing wise, we are hiring for a Sept. 2026 start date, but could be sooner.

We are looking forward to welcoming a new colleague!

Learn more and apply at apply.interfolio.com/171881

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

apply.interfolio.com

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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 14d

this opinion brought to you by the year 1995