Jan 9 2022
Always the Hurricanes Blowing (Part 2)
This post and the previous one use Atlantic hurricanes as a vehicle to show what various visualizations can do. It’s not about second-guessing the data scientists at NOAA who have produced similar displays and much deeper analyses. The point is to show tools anyone can apply to data that may have nothing to do with hurricanes:
- Processes, for spaghetti mapping.
- A fleet of trucks and their freight, on a map.
- Individual workpieces or part containers on a shop floor, if tracked.
- The migration of sources of defects in a manufacturing process.
- Projects going through phases.
- …
While the previous post aimed to show richer visualizations than possible with 100-year old techniques but it was still limited to a few static displays. This means charts that look the same in print and on a screen. This post includes dynamic displays, with animation and interactivity, that you can only use on a screen, and analyses of more of the columns in the HURDAT2 database.
The technology I used to produce these charts takes work but didn’t cost me a dime in license fees. The resulting charts are trivially easy for readers to understand and routinely used in publications like the online New York Times.
Dec 7 2022
Effective Visualizations
During the Van-of-Nerds Tour de France, in 9/22, one of our hosts said, “It’s one thing to collect data, but it’s another to make simple and usable summaries for people.” Some of the visualizations we saw at several sites, however, showed that our hosts underestimate what it takes to generate “simple and usable summaries.”
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By Michel Baudin • Van of Nerds • 1 • Tags: Data summaries, Data visualization, Visualization