A couple of weeks ago, I started making the graphs in the Financial Times’ Visual Vocabulary in Microsoft Excel. Based on the Graphic Continuum work I’ve done with Severino Ribecca, the FT’s Visual Vocabulary contains about 70 graphs with a…
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My affinity for tile grid maps is well documented. I think there a nice alternative to the standard choropleth map and even though they introduce their own geographic distortions (such as South Carolina placed to the east of North Carolina),…
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I’ve been making my way through Sandra Rendgen’s new book, The Minard System: The Complete Statistical Graphics of Charles-Joseph Minard. It’s a wonderful journey through Minard’s work and in particular, his development of the flow map. While Minard is generally…
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Spoiler alert! This post is going to ruin the end of the movie Avengers: Infinity War. The movie was released in April of this year and grossed more than $2 billion worldwide, so if you haven’t seen it, you probably…
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Update (2/2/19): It’s been about a month since this contest ended and about a dozen people have added their book reviews to Amazon. I’m grateful for those responses, but before I go about shipping books around the world, I’d like…
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The histogram is one of the most basic ways to visualize the distribution of your data. It’s a specific kind of bar chart that presents the tabulated frequency of data over distinct intervals (called bins) that sum to the total…
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Think of all the things you learned in elementary school: How to read. How to write. How to count. How to do add, subtract, multiply, and divide. These are all learned skills, things that we are not innately born knowing…
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Don’t let people fool you. PowerPoint, like Prezi, Keynote, and others is—for better and for worse—a tool. It doesn’t matter whether it was developed by a big, bureaucratic software company or whether it has been used poorly by (countless) others,…
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This stacked column chart from the USDA shows how effective tax rates will decline across seven farm commodity specializations resulting from last year’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). I needed to take a second look at this graph before…
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For a while now, I’ve been interested in trying to figure out how different research fields think about and use data visualization in their work. As an economist, I visualize data all the time–some of it makes it into the…
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