Ross-Chernoff Glyphs Or: How Do We Kill Bad Ideas in Visualization?

As data increases in dimensionality or complexity, it becomes difficult to graphically represent data items or series in a straightforward way. Chernoff faces encode data values as features of a human face, but afford only a handful of dimensions, and can be difficult to decode. In this paper, we extend and improve Chernoff faces by merging them with the work of landscape painter Bob Ross, creating data-landscapes glyphs that directly encode data as three series with arbitrary numbers of data items per series. This is pretty obviously a bad idea, yet it is difficult to precisely articulate why, given the current state of the art in academic visualization. We propose and evaluate this technique as a way of highlighting these gaps in our ontology of bad visualization ideas, with the goal of being able to dismiss future bad ideas right out of the gate.