Table
110 posts
This poster showed up in a NY subway train recently. Visual design is hard! What is the message? The intention is, of course, to say Rootine is better than others. (That's the Q corner, if you're following the Trifecta Checkup.) What is the visual telling us (V corner)? It says Rootine is yellow while Others are purple. What do these color mean? There is no legend to help decipher it....
Happy holidays to all my readers! A special shutout to those who've been around for over 15 years. *** The following enhanced data table appeared in Significance magazine (August 2021) under an article titled "Winning an election, not a popularity contest" (link, paywalled) It's surprising hard to read and there are many reasons contributing to this. First is the antiquated style guide of academic journals, in which they turn legends...
Thomas Mock explains how to extract and parse data tables in image files via ImageMagick and R: There are many times where someone shares data as an image, whether intentionally due to software constraints (ie Twitter) or as a result of not understanding the implications (image inside a PDF or in a Word Doc). xkcd.com jokingly refers to this as .norm or as the Normal File Format. While it’s far...
All you need is an old table, gift wrapping paper, and some varnish. I’m gonna have to do this. [via @datavisFriendly] Tags: IKEA, table
The New York Times found evidence that the richest segments of New Yorkers, presumably those with second or multiple homes, have exited the Big Apple during the early months of the pandemic. The article (link) is amply assisted by a variety of data graphics. The first few charts represent different attempts to express the headline message. Their appearance in the same article allows us to assess the relative merits of...
The recent post about multi-national companies reminded me of an older post, in which I stepped through data table enhancements. Here is a video of the process. You can use any tool to implement the steps; even Excel is good enough. The video is part of a series called "Data science: the Missing Pieces". In these episodes, I cover the parts of data science that are between the...
Several of us discussed this data visualization over twitter last week. The dataviz by Aero Data Lab is called “A Bird’s Eye View of Pharmaceutical Research and Development”. There is a separate discussion on STAT News. Here is the top section of the chart: We faced a number of hurdles in understanding this chart as there is so much going on. The size of the shapes is perhaps the first...
Reader Chris P. points me to this article about the design of the Periodic Table. I then learned that 2019 is the “International Year of the Periodic Table,” according to the United Nations. Here is the canonical design of the Periodic Table that science students are familiar with. (Source: Wikipedia.) The Periodic Table is an exercise of information organization and display. It's about adding structure to over 100 elements, so...
Saw this great little sign at Ippudo, the ramen shop, the other day: It's a great example of highly effective data visualization. The names on the board are sake brands. The menu (a version of a data table) is the conventional way of displaying this information. The Question Customers are selecting a sake. They don't have a favorite, or don't recognize many of these brands. They know a bit about...
Reader Patrick S. sent in this old gem from Germany. He said: It displays the change in numbers of visitors to public pools in the German city of Hanover. The invisible y-axis seems to be, um, nonlinear, but at least it's monotonic, in contrast to the invisible x-axis. There's a nice touch, though: The eyes of the fish are pie charts. Black: outdoor pools, white: indoor pools (as explained in...