Eli Holder

@elibryan.bsky.social

2793 Followers 4636 Following

Raleigh. How might we visualize people, fairly and equitably? Data / dataviz / design / psychology / research geek. He / him. Chaotic good. Follows Fizzlethorpe Bristlebane. Design / research / writing at https://3iap.com.

Mussolini saying stupid s*** “The entire white race, the Western race, could be submerged...” overlaid on a collage showing threatening population change charts.
A billionaire with money to burn... and outraged capuchin monkeys, with the question “How is [inequality] okay?”
Eugenicist Carl Brigham in front of a chart splattered in inkblot ink with text that says “Charts work like inkblots, and citations for Xiong Bearfield et al 2022 “Seeing What You Believe or Believing What You See? Belief Biases Correlation Estimation” and Luo & Zhao 2019
”Motivated Attention in Climate Change Perception and Action”
title slide asks “Why can’t we have nice things?” It shows a grumpy George Washington standing in front of Library building and a bunch of population / social outcome charts
Weather map of US with arrows point between Minnesota and Florida. It says "144° in feels like temp"
Pencil sketch of a diverging area chart with annotations
A quote describing Eli J. Finkel’s “Actor, Partner, Relationship” model of attraction. It reads: “Rather than having the 10s match with the 10s... most of us can find a partner who is something close to a 10 for us.” There’s also a figure loosely illustrating this, with lots of people matching with lots of other people.
Slide showing Sydney Sweeney beside the Jamie Miller character from Netflix’s “Adolescence” series Beside Sweeney is text: “Sydney Sweeney is genetically superior” Beside Miller is text “Others are genetically inferior.” This concept of genetic worth is part of both eugenics and the incel belief system
Slide showing a bar chart of public health disparities with the text “Save lives. Stop bar charts.” From my deathly dataviz talk: https://3iap.com/rladies2025/
Demonstrating viewers’ explanations for health disparities based on viewing health disparity charts. They often blame people (personal attribution) by explaining the disparities in terms of personal behavior or characteristics “Drinking and smoking”, “too much fried food”, “bad genes.” These may make sense at individual levels, but not for populations. Or you could attribute these disparities to external social determinants of health like “access to care, good food”, “neighborhood pollution”, “structural racism” quotes are paraphrased from qual responses seen in the “Must be a Tuesday” study https://doi.org/10.1109/VIS55277.2024.00021
A quote from RFK Jr “It’s exceedingly difficult for measles to kill a healthy individual ...there’s a connection between those who suffer from measles and individuals who lack proper nutrition or don’t engage in regular physical activity.”
Slide with a photo from the American Eagle “good genes” ad with the subtext as actual text: “Sydney Sweeney is genetically superior”
applying the "woke" critical analysis framework to the jeans ad. What does the ad claim technically? What does it suggest? How might people act on it?
photo from SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver. it shows the word SIGGRAPH in big letters on the expo floor.
Closeup mockup showing the evenly spaced dots and how dot stacks align between plot rows.
Work in progress mockups showing a version with color coded population segments, instead of the monochrome look that made it into the final report
Mosaic plots from wikipedia of expected titanic survival rates where "yes" (light gray). This shows proportionate outcomes where equal portions of all groups survive.
Growth as an Equity Indicator (Baseline Scenario). The mosaic plot depicts percentages of students demonstrating different levels of growth based upon the growth needed by the student. The widths of the columns represent the current percentage of students in each category (in this figure 50%, 25% and 25% have growth goals of > 1 Year’s Growth, 1 Year’s Growth, and < 1 Year’s Growth, respectively. The heights of the rectangles represent the percentage of students in each row category demonstrating that amount of growth (uniform distribution of growth by prior achievement). This shows proportionate results.
Screenshot of Google cloud's Vertex AI / "Media Studio" / Veo 2 tool annotated with big red letters saying "$16 per click" and pointing to a submit button. If you follow the page's prompt to "Try this: "Pancakes with maple syrup, cinematic food advertisement b-roll, dynamic."" It will spit out four 8-second clips of oddly rendered pancakes and bill you $16, which is quite a bit more expensive than actual pancakes.
to chat gpt: "can you write glsl to show a surface (a rectangle) that's being twisted almost like a dna helix?" Not quite what I wanted, but I didn't realize it could spit out complete, working GLSL?
Postcard from NAEP with icon of a histogram. It says "2024 nation's report card distribution charts. View how NAEP performance varies within specific student groups. NAEP: National Assessment of Educational Progress"
talk summary slide. It says "Improving Score Reporting of Student Group Results to Better Support Educational Equity" and lists the panelists.
IIB awards judge postcard. It says "I'm a Judge! Information is Beautiful Awards 2024"
Screenshot of an article that says "Can Tech Get Nuclear Power to Move at AI Speeds?"
screenshot of Civ VII review. It says "Civilization VII is mostly fine on Steam Deck, which is great news"
quote from Isaac Chotiner's interview with Senator Brian Schatz: "And one of the things that Republicans do well is not allow their pollsters to tell them everything. They invent whole stories and then the polling follows." https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/do-democrats-have-a-plan-brian-schatz
Headline from CBS' article saying 'Trump has positive approval amid "energetic" opening weeks; seen as doing what he promised
People protesting outside Sen Tillis Raleigh office last Tuesday
Crowd outside Sen Tillis and Budd's Raleigh NC offices, protesting Trump / Musk / Vought / Project 2025 takeover.
census.gov is down?!
Image shows two line charts, each labeled "United States: Income Inequality Over Time." Two stimuli charts used in "Does Inequality Beget Inequality? Experimental Tests of the Prediction that Inequality Increases System Justification Motivation.” Both of these charts use the same data. In fact, they're identical except for one key difference: Flatter Trendline shows the full y-axis (0–100). Steeper Trendline shows a compressed y-axis (35-50).
Cover slide for my "deathly dataviz" talk. It says "a morbid introduction to equity impacts for visualizing population health"
blog post quote: Balancing commitment and contrast matters when choosing between positive and negative feedback. For example: If you’re teaching a child to play piano, you might lean toward positive feedback. Encouraging and rewarding their successes builds their commitment, whereas focusing on mistakes may cause them to give up before they have a chance to improve (children, dolphins and husbands have this in common). However, if your student already plays for the philharmonic, negative feedback might be more effective. If they’re already committed and confident in the instrument, highlighting their mistakes surfaces the gap between their current playing and latent virtuosity, helping them improve.
Example chart showing experiment effect. It's visually very busy with lots of different font combos, overly chunky elements, etc.
Philip Meyer quote: "The most efficient way to improve the standards of journalism, therefore, is to attack the New York Times. https://www.aapor.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Public-Opin-Q-1990-MEYER-451-9.pdf
Screenshot of a reddit thread criticizing an old chart / blog post. Them: "It's all just shoddy work" Me: "Aha! It's actually even shoddier than you think!"
A quick video of scrolling through a portfolio page with side notes + marginalia.
Quoted text: "this is a very highly popular measure, and was polled earlier this year and received support of 70% to 29%" Daniel said
A fake chart with a big inkblot over the plot
Diagram from McNutt, Huang, Koenig's "Visualization for Villainy" VIS paper, covering the "design space of harm that visualizations can do" Harm can be described along two axes, either Non-Physical←→Physical and Indirect←→Direct. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.06007
Table I.2.1 from PISA 2022 results report, showing that even though you can order countries by scores, but score diffs between neighboring countries might just be noise https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html
For PIAAC Numeracy scores, the US ranks #28 of 38 countries surveyed in terms of % adults scoring at level 3 or above. e.g. for US, ~37% of respondents had proficient scores (level 3+), vs 63% for Japan and 58% for Finland. Reproduced from https://web.archive.org/web/20201024031753/https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/publications/countryspecificmaterial/PIAAC_Country_Note_USA.pdf Each horizontal bar represents proportion of test takers for each PIAAC level (without showing non-responses due to language barriers). These proportions (seem to?) cause bars to shift left or right moreso than you might expect if you were just comparing score means. Ranking also seems to exaggerate the differences. Average US score is pretty close to the overall average, but 28 out of 38 feels worse?
Nexus k screenshot
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/NddSWs
Animating clinical trial outcomes for a bunch of patients at smoothed timesteps
Transcript from Philip Meyer's 1990 AAPOR presidential address, highlighting "Why journalists should feel so guilty about their obsessive concern with who is ahead is hard to fathom. The most interesting fact about an election is who wins. The most interesting thing about a campaign at any given moment is who is ahead."
Slide from Catherine D'Ignazio IEEE VIS Talk, showing a "doubt" about typical visualizations of social outcome disparities. She highlights two implicit, questionable theories of change behind these charts. 1. if you show harms / injustice, someone will magically go and solve it. 2. by quantifying harms, you can make a better case for reparations (unclear if this works though).
A population health bar chart showing disparities in heart disease between social (racial) groups with text: "These charts are bad for our health"
A proposed alternative way to visualize population health disparities, emphasizing geographic variability with annotations and jitter plots.
A population health bar chart showing disparities in heart disease between social (racial) groups with text: "Can we do better?"
Racquel lays out the problem. You have a stack of density plots. Each curve has the same area (in pixels), but this means that they can have very different heights. This is a problem when you're running out of space.
Slide from Leilani Battle and Alvitta Ottley VIS talk showing the structure of an "insight", with data facts → generalizations ← context.
Slide from Derya Akbaba's VIS talk, showing how data, visualizations, and interpretations are all "entangled" with the messy / human world around it.
Quoting paper's abstract: "These results suggest that there are a large number of party loyalists in the United States, that their claims to being a self-defined conservative are suspect, and that group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles."
Quote from "political psychology primer for information designers" blog post, saying "We're flexible on policies as long as they're supported by our people."
Screenshot from the presentation, asking what makes a "better" chart for visualizing population health outcomes? It shows an example bar chart of crude mortality rates from heart disease for four different social groups.
Title slide from my talk for the UK Healthcare TUG. It says: 3iap presents: Deathly Dataviz. A morbid introduction to 
“Equitable Epidemiology.” Or, how popular population health charts can backfire and undermine public health. And what we can do instead. By Eli Holder
Screenshot of NYTimes home page showing clickbait-y poll reporting.
Two screenshots of Jawbone UP's activity graphs. The graph on the left shows a user who has not met their 10,000 step goal. The graph on the right shows a user who has exceeded their goal.