Data Accuracy

Late last year, I presented my work on the Urban Institute’s Do No Harm project to analysts at a state department of health. (I’ve changed specific numbers in this post and am not naming the state or hospitals to keep the information…

In Steve Wexler, Jeff Shaffer, and Andy Cotgreave’s great book, The Big Book of Dashboards, they define a data dashboard as: A visual display of data used to monitor conditions and/or facilitate understanding. I was reminded of their definition because…

We all love the overtly wrong data visualization. The graph that is so clearly and obviously incorrect that it makes us laugh—and cry. Sometimes it doesn’t matter all that much, like this graph from a Milwaukee news channel. We all…

Broadly, data visualization criticisms allow practitioners to further the field, explore new approaches and new dimensions, and understand what works and what doesn’t for different audiences, platforms, and content areas. But the current approach to data visualization critique doesn’t achieve…

A conversation that often pops up in visualizing data is what to do about outliers. How should we handle data values that are so much larger (or smaller) than the rest of the values in our data? In this post,…