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Ihaka Lecture

I gave the first of this year’s Ihaka Lectures at the University of Auckland this past July. It revisited and partially updated things I’ve been talking about for the past eighteen months or so on trust in data visualization (and by extension in scientific work) in the light of the many challenges we presently face.

R

Sociology

Visualization

Apple

Nerdery

Zero Sum Problems

Over at Daring Fireball , John Gruber makes a passing observation about the Apple Sports app: I’ve got some gripes about certain specific aspects of Apple Sports. Like, where does one even start to explain how much is wrong with their zero-sum visualization of team stats ? Has anyone ever even seen a presentation like that before? Anyone ? That “Anyone” link lands over here. Hi…

Bad Weather and the Subway

Snow in Inwood, New York. Photograph by the author. Recently I’ve been looking at hourly ridership data from the New York City Subway. Last time we learned that people go to work in the morning and come home in the evening , for example. (All together now: “Only in New York, baby!”) Today we’ll learn that bad weather makes people stay at home. Except, sometimes it…

Hourly Subway Station Flows

Pie charts are bad , as any fule kno. We’re not as good at judging relative differences between angles and areas as we are at judging relative differences in lengths on a common baseline. This is especially true when we have more than two things to compare at the same time. So, as a rule, you shouldn’t use them. You should figure out some other way of viewing your data instead. On the…

New York City Hexmaps

The five boroughs of New York City can be informally or formally carved up into many different pieces, depending on what it is that you’re doing. As part of an ongoing project, I recently made an R package, nycmaps , that lets you draw maps of some of these geographies. Things being what they are, these spatial units don’t necessarily overlap in compatible ways. City, State, and…

Politics

Subway Sign

After the parking signs last time, here is a subway sign. A borough-specific sign to display Here’s a direct link to the PNG and the PDF . Once again, put it onna stick and exercise the constitutional rights to freedom of expression, speech, and assembly enjoyed by everyone in the United States .

Confessors in Harmony

Charles Fourier was an early socialist utopian, part of the French tradition of thinkers who came up with various schemes for the complete reorganization of society on more rational grounds, and whose views now read to us as an unstable admixture of obviously sensible notions, delusional crankery, and things that seem to encapsulate both of those elements at once in a way that brings out the…

Using Quarto to Write a Book

I’ve spent the last couple of months revising my Data Visualization book for a second edition that, ideally, will appear some time in the next twelve months. As with the first edition, I’ve posted a complete draft of the book at its website. The production process hasn’t started yet, so it’s not ready to pre-order or anything, but the site has a one-question form you can…

Data Visualization, Second Edition

I’ve written a second edition of Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction , which ideally should come out with Princeton University Press later this year. As with the first edition, a full draft of the book is available at https://socviz.co . The production process is just getting started so there’s no new cover yet, and there isn’t a link to pre-order. But (also like last…