BLOG POSTS

A pictoral insight into the challenge of teaching. “People might seek teaching in data visualisation because they find themselves doing this…”

Below you will find an embedded slideshare version of the slides used in last week’s talk at OpenVisConf 2014 held in Boston (well, officially Cambridge but Boston was only a bridge away).

I’m posting this as a separate discussion thread but in follow up to the previous post about the Gun Crimes chart and the issue of confusion vs. deception.

Overnight I saw quite a few tweets spinning off an article ‘How to Lie with Data Visualisation’. Initially, I mistakenly thought this had been written by Aatish Bhatia but it was actually from Ravi Parikh. It is a good article picking up on some of the classic subjects of our ire (Fox News, truncated y-axes).

This morning I tweeted an interesting observation made on BBC News discussing the missing Malaysian airline “We are now not used to no information”. It is entirely true. In this age of so much, any gaps become so extraordinary.

I was really interested to see the Sunlight Foundation share details of its internal ‘Data Visualization Style Guidelines’ the other day. Whilst I’ve not had chance to take a magnifying glass to the specific details of advice, I am impressed with how they have framed this document.

They (human people) say the key to comedy is timing. Well timing is also a key factor with regards to blogging, certainly when covering particular subjects. So a write-up of Tapestry Conference 2014, which took place almost a week ago, is already tiptoeing sheepishly outside the ‘news cycle’.

Yesterday there was a fair bit of twittering about a map that was ‘doing the rounds’. The map shows where 50% of the GDP of the US comes from geographically. I came across it via a tweet from Ian Sefferman.

On December 21st 2013 the New York Times published a project titled ‘How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk’, developed by Wilson Andrews and Josh Katz. The project is based on Josh’s own research exploring ‘Regional Dialect Variation in the Continental US’ building on questions and data from the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder.

Below you will find an embedded slideshare version of the slides used in last week’s talk at the Design of Understanding 2014 conference. I also did a similar (but longer) talk to students on a Editorial Media Design course at Hogeschool Utrecht the day before.

Big Data is a term that, according to the 2013 Gartner Hype Cycle, is reaching the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ and about to face the slippery decline down the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’.