Visualisingdata.com was originally launched in 2010 originally to serve as a blog to help continue the momentum of my learning from studying the subject via a Masters degree. I continue to publish articles and share announcements that track developments in my professional experiences as well as developments in the data visualisation field at large.
This is a collection of all my published posts, starting with the newest and dating back to 2010, tracking. These posts include articles, design commentaries, podcast updates, professional updates, and general news from across the data visualisation field.
A quick post to share something that I’ve been really in to this past week or so: dendrochronology. Also known as tree-ring dating, it is the “scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree rings”.
You work you’re way through the data, come up with an idea for the most interesting angle of analysis, chart your data, and delight yourself with the compelling emerging display: look how clearly it shows the difference between men vs. women!
The Bank of England has announced details of its first data visualisation competition, in conjunction with the One Bank Research Agenda conference and the release of new publicly available Bank data sets. The winning entry will receive £5000.
I’m musing about this visualisation work that has received a lot of love and attention on blogs and social media over the past few days. Created by the excellent people in the Wall Street Journal graphics team, it portrays data about the impact of vaccines in battling infectious diseases in the 20th Century.
One of the frequent questions I get asked, particularly by people from a scientific or financial domain, is how to effectively visualise uncertainty of data and of statistics. My response is usually to make suggestions around annotated markings and/or colour gradients to indicate increasing or declining certainties.
Today I am celebrating the 5th birthday of visualisingdata.com and I wanted to thank every single one of the half a million visitors who have been to my site. Whether you have been along just the once or have been back time and time again, you have all helped to make this such an incredibly rewarding activity.
At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. Here’s the latest collection from December 2014.
There’s a smart new project from the team at Clever Franke who have created a digital package of visual content around the topics of ‘Mobility, Economy and Livability’ for CMAP, the regional planning agency for metropolitan Chicago.
It goes without saying how much of a privilege it is to be invited to contribute to a Data Stories podcast and last week I joined hosts Enrico and Moritz alongside Robert Kosara to review the major trends and developments during 2014 and preview the main hopes and expectations for 2015.
Anybody facing up to colour choices in any creative activity knows how critical such decisions can be between the success and failure of a design. This is amplified in data visualisation. In contrast to graphic design work, for example, there is greater need to eliminate or at least reduce arbitrary choices.
I was honoured to be invited to speak at the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions Annual Conference for 2015 event in Grapevine, Texas.
With the new year well under way it is a good time to open up a renewed opportunity for people interested in my training offerings to influence where I take my next set of public events.
In an attempt to increase my blog post frequency, this year I’m going to publish more smaller posts that try to impart morsels of advice or thought-provocations about certain visualisation design matters. I’m going to start off 2015 focusing on a long-held gripe I have with map-based visualisations that colour the sea.
To mark the milestone of each mid-year and end-of-year I take a reflective glance over the previous 6 month period in the data visualisation field and compile a collection of some of the most significant developments.
At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. Here’s the latest collection from November 2014.
Last week there was an article on Wired profiling an upcoming tool from Tableau called Elastic, which drew my ire. The tool looks fine, haven’t seen a great deal about it but I’m sure it will find a user base.
At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. Here’s the latest collection from October 2014.
I was immensely grateful to be invited to speak at yesterday’s excellent Visualized.io conference event in London. As I previewed last week, the title of my talk was ‘The Design of Time’.
Back in September I profiled the Visualized.io conference taking place in London this year. Time has raced by and the event is coming up this Saturday. I have the great fortune of being one of the invited speakers.
At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. Here’s the latest collection from September 2014.
I’ve had this issue on my mind for a while now but haven’t really found a way of expressing a cohesive post about it. I still haven’t, as you’ll find by the time you reach the bottom. Let me state from the outset: today, I am the problem guy, not the solution guy.
Ages ago I wrote an article for Wiley’s ‘Statistics Views’ site and it looks like it was finally published yesterday. The piece is titled “Visualising Statistics: The importance of seeing not just describing data”
Since first publishing my resources collection a couple of years ago I’ve been fortunate to have had lots of startups and vendors contact me to share news about their latest features and tools.
As the final members of the graphics teams (1, 2, 3, 4 etc.) across the news media finally shut down their machines after a long night of mid-term election coverage, I am reminded of a great article by Matt Ericson from 2010 titled ‘When maps shouldn’t be maps’
I have been exploring the absorbing ‘The Library Project’, a collaboration between the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University, led by Laura Kurgan, and visualisation design/developers Annelie Berner, Jen Lowe and Derek Watkins.
Earlier this week I published my slides from a talk I gave last week in San Francisco. One of the key things I discussed was the importance of carefully considering your editorial focus and I equated some of the ideas to the world of photojournalism.
Over on my ‘References’ page, I have updated the collection of data visualisation and related books. The list is now up to 99 titles, which makes for a nice soundbitey title but it will continue to grow and in a more timely manner than before now.
Below you will find an embedded slideshare version of the slides used in last week’s talk at the Data Visualization Group in the Bay Area Meetup at the University of San Francisco.
This weekend Gregor Aisch and Kevin Quealy published a great graphic for The Upshot that charts the record-breaking NFL touchdown passing achievements of Peyton Manning.
Earlier this year I profiled the success of participative visualisations, visual projects that go beyond interactive interrogation to invite the user to put themselves at the heart of the subject’s data.