Articles

There has been much discussion this past couple of days about John Burn-Murdoch’s article in the Guardian ‘Why you should never trust a visualisation’ which was itself a response to an earlier article by Pete Warden that proposed ‘Why you should never trust a data scientist’.

Over on Fell In Love With Data, Enrico Bertini has started a really interesting conversation about the best way to teach data visualisation. This is in contrast to the majority of conversations that typically take place around how best to learn data visualisation.

The shared principles and motives between visualisation and other forms or channels of communication always intrigue me. The craft of the cartoonist especially fascinates me.

I’ve had this draft post sat gathering WordPress dust for over 7 months so I thought it was time for it to be put out of its misery.

Before I begin, let me concede that there is a good chance that, by the time I get to the end, this post might not go anywhere, it might not hang together well and might be rather incohesive. It is my first day back after holidays and I’m not on top of my game yet.

I have written in the past about the way those of us active in the field operate within something of an artificial environment. It is unavoidable and not unique to data visualisation but when your day is spent networking and communicating ideas largely just with other captive members of the discipline you do so within a bit of a bubble.

I was hard at work this morning preparing for a variety of things and it just so happened that I had Jonathan Corum’s ‘Kepler’s Tally of Planets’ work on my screen and BBC Radio 6Music playing in the background.

Last night I had the privilege of talking at the New York Data Visualisation meetup event, hosted by the good people at McKinsey. This was based on a similar talk I gave in London last week as part of the ‘IDA talks’ series. The talk was titled ‘Opposites Attract: The Art and Science of Data Visualisation’.

Published yesterday comes the newest episode of the PBS ‘Off Book’ series in the form of a nice video titled “The Art of Data Visualization”, a subject close to the topic of some of my recent talks.

This is a guest post by Johanna Morariu (@j_morariu) and Ann Emery (@annkemery) who work for Innovation Network, a nonprofit evaluation, research, and consulting firm in Washington, DC.