I’m currently teaching a Data Visualization class in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. To celebrate Pi Day yesterday, each student was given a pie chart I found online and asked to remake it. The rules were simple: They…
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Back when I worked for the Congressional Budget Office, I was required to file an annual financial disclosure form. I totally hated it. I had to document every stock holding, 529 account, savings bond, my spouse’s income, everything. And even…
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You probably know that I’m a big fan of slope charts. And dot plots. Big fan. Love them both. But neither are default chart types in Excel, which, believe it or not, is still the primary data visualization tool for…
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The conventional wisdom these days is that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. We are always looking down at our phones, not looking at the world around us. Conversations don’t occur because we need to check email or…
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Last week, I spent an amazing day in New York City working with about 35 other awesome people discussing the ethical, security, and privacy challenges facing people working with data and creating data visualizations. The conversations at this Responsible Data Forum were…
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A few months ago, I wrote a post on why PowerPoint is not to blame for bad presentations. In that post, I also promised to publish snippets from the book I’m writing on presentation skills with Columbia University Press. Turns…
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I usually hate these kind of “Year in Review” wrap-up posts, but I figured I have enough good and bad stuff saved that it was worth sharing. No rankings here, just a stream-of-consciousness kind of thing. But let me be…
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This post was originally published on the Urban Institute’s blog, Urban Wire on December 17, 2015. Earlier this week, I wrote about how new and nontraditional forms of data hold promise for public policy researchers, but also raise a lot of new questions….
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This post was originally published on the Urban Institute’s blog, Urban Wire on December 14, 2015. Changes in the value, kinds, and availability of data can have a profound impact on how places like the Urban Institute conduct research. As new kinds of…
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Marimekko charts encode two variables: one along the height of the vertical axis and another using the width of the bars or columns. This one from The Economist, for example, has GDP per capita ($) on the vertical axis and…
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