Is a data journalist one who unearths the data, who finds the insights in the data, who finds the right way to visually communicate the data? The answer is, of course, all three. But let’s tease them apart and look at each separately. Unearthing the Data First, the data has to be found. And finding, […]
This post is by Phil Price A Washington Post article says “In the first study of its kind, researchers from Washington State University and elsewhere found a 14 percent greater risk of head injuries to cyclists associated with cities that have bike share programs. In fact, when they compared raw head injury data for cyclists […] The post As if we needed another example of lying with statistics and not…
It’s so simple it feels entirely trivial: bars in a bar chart pointing down instead of up. But the effect can be striking. And it’s not as obvious when to show downward-pointing bars as it might seem. The pure visualization point of view is that bars point up for positive numbers and down for negative […]
When I was in Portland over the holidays a few weeks ago, I noticed a visualization in the local newspaper, The Oregonian. I had never heard of that before, nor of Mark Friesen, who created it. Wondering how many visualizations I might be missing, I decided to build a website that would collect them all: newsvis.org.
I am currently attending the 2013 Joint Statistical Meeting in Montreal. I will try to share a few of the things that I take away each day. Last night (Monday) I attended the JSM keynote speaker with Nate Silver and it proved to be a very interesting discussion. Silver is best known for his work […]
There are many differences between data analysis and presentation. One that is often overlooked is the need to focus a story to just the essential points, and not overload it with unnecessary detail. Minard’s famous map is a great example of reduction to the bare minimum. Minard’s famous map of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia summarizes the fate of some 420,000 men over more than six months. They were not alone,…
There is a lot of confusion about storytelling and what tells a story. I have argued previously that stories do not tell themselves. Rather, we tell the stories given raw materials. Some of these materials lend themselves better to ad-hoc storytelling, so we tend to say that they actually tell the story, when it’s really us who do it. Exhibit A: Minard A particular example of the easy storytelling genre…
After my recent abstraction exercise created some interesting discussion but kind of went off in a slightly wrong direction, here is another experiment. Let’s take the data from Nigel Holmes’ famous Monster chart and turn that into a simple bar chart. I chose a similarly basic one here as the one in Bateman et al.’s study, but the filled bars are slightly less ugly. The x axis shows years in…
One of the many things Malofiej 20 made me wonder about is how we present data and what we expect from such a presentation. Very often, we essentially narrate the process of discovery, but is that really the best way? And how much data do we need to show when making a point? Just because we start out with lots of data does not mean we really need to show it…
How does the New York Times Graphics Department produce the fantastic work that wins so many awards? To get a taste of the secret sauce, all you need to do is track down their Twitter accounts and blogs, where they openly share sketches and talk about process. Here is a guide. This list is roughly ordered by the amount of material each of the people listed below shares. While a…
