Data visualization

YoungManConfusedByChart2

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 • Van of Nerds • 1 • Tags: , ,

UtamaroJapaneseStorm.png

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.

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By • Data science • 0 • Tags: , ,

Mar 24 2020

A Sobering But Remarkable Chart | Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz | New York Times

Click picture to enlarge as needed.

 

“As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, people are dying around the world. But the trajectories of cases and deaths differ by country.”

Source: The New York Times

Michel Baudin‘s comments: On two prior occasions, I pointed out remarkable graphics in the New York Times:

This one, however, is remarkably rich, yet readable thanks to details like labeling the lines with the name of the country, as opposed to having the names in a legend block. The author, Josh Katz. is a graphics editor for the newspaper and his co-author, Margot Sanger-Katz, a writer on health care.

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By • Press clippings • 0 • Tags:

Aug 24 2017

Sophisticated Graphics In The New York Times

“Even after decades of affirmative action, black and Hispanic students are more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago, according to a New York Times analysis. The share of black freshmen at elite schools is virtually unchanged since 1980. Black students are just 6 percent of freshmen but 15 percent of college-age Americans, as the chart below shows.”

Sourced through the New York Times

Michel Baudin‘s comments: This morning’s New York Times contains an article with data visualizations at varying levels of detail that are far more sophisticated than the usual pie charts and stacked bar charts commonly found in the American press as well as in business presentations and shop floor performance dashboards.

The exact meaning of the above chart between the title and the lead of the article is not immediately obvious. After looking at it for a minute or two, you realize that it has a high data-to-ink ratio: it makes a non-trivial point in a flourish-free format that I think Edward Tufte would approve.

The article is about the relative representation of different groups in the student population of 101 institutions,  including the Ivy League, University of California campuses, “top liberal arts colleges,” “other top universities,” and “public flagship universities.” The study compares the proportion of freshmen enrolled from each group to their proportion in the college-age population as a whole.

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By • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: , ,

Apr 26 2017

New Chart Junk: Squaring The Pie

The purpose of graphics for data visualization is communication, not decoration, which is often forgotten in publications as well as on company performance dashboards. A case in point is the chart on yesterday’s cover of the New York Times. It shows that solar energy currently accounts for more than twice as many jobs as coal. It also shows the numbers of jobs in different sectors and uses a color code to mark some as based on fossil fuels versus renewable and low-emission technologies. 

Until recently, most publications would have used a pie chart. Now, graphic artists have found a way to square the pie chart into yet another style that will most likely trickle down to slideware and office walls, in spite of a low data-to-ink ratio and the use of two-dimensional shapes to display one-dimensional data.

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By • Press clippings, Uncategorized • 10 • Tags: , ,

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