We all agree that the direction of the bars in a bar chart should correspond to the direction in which the values grow. Or do we? When it comes to running or audio recording and processing, it turns out that the seemingly wrong choice can be the right one – because a more semantically meaningful representation can help us understand and use the data much more easily.
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New Video: Linear vs. Quadratic Change
Scaling objects to represent a value is a key part of visualization, but it’s not without its pitfalls. Especially when it comes to fancy infographic bar charts, it can easily distort the value’s appearance. Why that is, and where else this can happen, isn’t always obvious. In my new video, I show how it happens and how to do it right – and how this issue inspired ISOTYPE.
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New video: Florence Nightingale’s Famous Rose Chart (aka “Coxcomb”)
It’s Florence Nightingale’s 201st birthday tomorrow! Since I missed her 200th, I figured I’d make a video about her famous chart. What made it tick? What was it about? Who was Nightingale, anyway?
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New video: Chart Appreciation, Black vs. White Boys and The Punishing Reach of Racism
Dots fly across the screen, some of them moving up, some down. They represent black and white boys, and how their income differs from that of their parents and from each other. It’s a great way to show this data in an engaging way and without having to explain percentiles. This is a chart appreciation.
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The Dearth of Videos about Visualization
To appropriate the famous Martin Mull quote, writing about visualization is like dancing about architecture. Why are we using written words, like this blog post, to talk about visualization instead of moving images, like in a video?
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eagereyesTV: Minard’s Famous “Napoleon’s March” Chart – What It Shows, What It Doesn’t
This chart is a staple in every visualization course and many visualization talks. But what does it show, and what does it leave out? There’s a lot more to Napoleon’s Russian Campaign and to Charles Minard’s work than this one chart. My new video looks beyond the surface of what is perhaps the most famous chart out there.
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Felix Auerbach, Die Graphische Darstellung (Graphical Representation, 1914)
This little book covers a large number of different ways of showing data. There are also some mathematical graphs, but the focus is on representations of data “from all areas of science and practice.” It’s a fascinating look into what was known in the early 1900s, and how people thought about graphical representations as tools.
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Video Series: Counting In 2021 with Mechanical Calculators
Mechanical calculators are fascinating. I may have gone down a few rabbit holes on this topic earlier this year, and acquired a few. As a little celebration of the end of this year, and to start the new one, I’m creating a small series of videos about them and releasing one each week.
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eagereyesTV: Chart Appreciation, What’s Really Warming the World
Line charts – they’re not the most glamorous. And yet, they can be used to tell a compelling story about global warming. In this video, I talk about what I consider a modern classic of data journalism, What’s Really Warming the World by Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi: how it works, how it’s structured, and why it works so well.
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All (Line) Charts are Wrong, But Some Are Useful
Line charts are one of the most common and useful charts out there. But why draw straight lines between the data points? They almost never represent what the data is actually doing, no matter if the data is single observations or aggregated over time. How do line charts actually work, and what do they imply about the data?
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