Overview There are times when an attendee at one of my workshops will share a chart or dashboard that is extremely complicated, to the point where I have a lot of trouble parsing it. I point out that I am a “professional chart looker-atter” and that if I am having trouble understanding the dashboard, I [...]
Revisit the political divide in the US, take a deep dive into a Washington Post visualization about vaccine intentions among healthcare workers, showcase some stellar social media data visualization projects, and review Robert Kosara's video on the famous Minard chart. https://youtu.be/kXn3aqGIOXk
Let me show you a few techniques that will allow you to ditch color legends and in so doing make it easier for your audience to understand the charts you create. Direct Labeling Lines Here’s a “before” picture of a simple line chart with a color legend. Figure 1 - Line chart with color legend. [...]
The Data Detective Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford Readers of my blog and newsletter know that I am a big fan of the books Factfulness and Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). I want to add Tim Harford’s The Data Detective to this “how to make sense [...]
We discuss bar-in-bar charts, scaredy-cats and TURDs, great work from the New York Times, how to visualize 500,000 deaths, and the orange/blue debate. https://youtu.be/kco5U5wgDfY
In this Chart Chat we reflect on Sankey and proportion charts, unit charts, unemployment charts and presenting complex data. https://youtu.be/IIirXyOcbeQ
The best encapsulation I’ve heard of the past year comes from a colleague, Jon Cohen of SurveyMonkey, who saw this twitter post: There’s so much to be grateful for, but so little to be happy about. I am very grateful that there remains a demand for my services, but I [...]
January 18, 2021 Some thoughts about critique in data visualization. Background For the past 18 months I’ve been working on a new book (more on this in a moment). Last September, I asked some colleagues to review selected chapters. I asked everybody to review the preface, which included this passage: My friend Jonathan Schwabish provided [...]
Overview I’ve written almost ten years’ worth of blog posts on visualizing survey data using Tableau (see https://www.datarevelations.com/visualizing-survey-data/). The good news is that dozens of how-to articles that are currently on my website are relevant and the techniques work. That said, Tableau made a HUGE change in how you can model data with the release [...]
In this Chart Chat we reflect on a night of election vizzes, the lack of innovation and clarity (with the exception of the tie gauge, frownometer, and chipped cartogram) and whether we should access all visualizations based on precision (spoiler alert:NO!). https://youtu.be/xa2T-dIA-T0
