In anticipation of the second edition of Data Visualization, which is coming later this year from Princeton University Press, version 2.0.0 of my socviz package is now on CRAN. The update removes some functions that aren’t needed anymore and adds a couple of sample datasets. ❧ Continue reading…
I gave the first of this year’s Ihaka Lectures at the University of Auckland this past July. It revisited and partially updated things I’ve been talking about for the past eighteen months or so on trust in data visualization (and by extension in scientific work) in the light of the many challenges we presently face. ❧ Continue reading…
Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber makes a passing observation about the Apple Sports app:
I’ve got some gripes about certain specific aspects of Apple Sports. Like, where does one even start to explain how much is wrong with their zero-sum visualization of team stats? Has anyone ever even seen a presentation like that before? Anyone?
That “Anyone” link lands over here. Hi everyone! The team stats image is quite confusing. It’s a summary of a game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder. I don’t know much about basketball, but I do know a bit about data visualization and in a pleasing coincidence my former student Josh Fink is the A-VP of Basketball Data Science for the Spurs. Here is the image that John objected to: ❧ Continue reading…
Snow in Inwood, New York. Photograph by the author.
Recently I’ve been looking at hourly ridership data from the New York City Subway. Last time we learned that people go to work in the morning and come home in the evening, for example. (All together now: “Only in New York, baby!”) Today we’ll learn that bad weather makes people stay at home. Except, sometimes it doesn’t. ❧ Continue reading…
Pie charts are bad, as
any fule kno. We’re not as good at judging relative differences between angles
and areas as we are at judging relative differences in lengths on a common
baseline. This is especially true when we have more than two things to compare
at the same time. So, as a rule, you shouldn’t use them. You should figure out
some other way of viewing your data instead. On the other hand, I just made 424
animated pie charts because if you’re going to break a rule you should break
it good and hard. ❧ Continue reading…
