dataviz

Interactive graphics for data analysis

September 1, 2011 | richierocks

I got a copy of Martin Theus and Simon Urbanek’s Interactive Graphics for Data Analysis a couple of years ago, whence it’s been sat on my bookshelf. Since I’ve recently become a self-proclaimed expert on interactive graphics I thought it was about time I read the thing. ... [Read more...]

Nomograms everywhere!

August 30, 2011 | richierocks

At useR!, Jonty Rougier talked about nomograms, a once popular visualisation that has fallen by the wayside with the rise of computers. I’d seen a few before, but hadn’t understood how they worked or why you’d want to use them. Anyway, since that talk I’ve been ... [Read more...]

hacking .gov shortened links

July 30, 2011 | Harlan

This past Friday, the web portal to the US Federal government, USA.gov, organized hackathons across the US for programmers and data scientists to work with and analyze the data from their link-shortening service. It turns out that if you shorten a web link with bit.ly, the shortened link ... [Read more...]

intuitive visualizations of categorization for non-technical audiences

April 25, 2011 | Harlan

For a project I’m working on at work, I’m building a predictive model that categorizes something (I can’t tell you what) into two bins. There is a default bin that 95% of the things belong to and a bin that the business cares a lot about, containing 5% of ... [Read more...]

Legendary Plots

March 12, 2011 | richierocks

I was recently pointed in the direction of a thermal comfort model by the engineering company Arup (p27–28 of this pdf). Figure 3 at the top of p28 caught my attention. It’s mostly a nice graph; there’s not too much junk in it. One thing that struck me was ... [Read more...]

Presenting Immer’s barley data

October 31, 2010 | richierocks

Last time I talked about adapting graphs for presentations. This time I’m putting some of the concepts I discussed there into action, with a presentation of Immer’s barley dataset. This is a classic dataset, originally published in 1934; in 1993 Bill Cleveland mentioned it in his book Visualising Data on ...

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Adapting graphs for presentations

October 28, 2010 | richierocks

I’ve just finished reading slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. It contains lots of advice about how to convey meaning through aesthetics. The book has a general/business presentation focus, but it got me wondering about how to apply the ideas in a scientific context. Since graphs from a big ...