Recent content in Blogs on kieranhealy.org
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 .
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…
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…
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…
The Socio-Economic Review has published a book symposium on The Ordinal Society with contributions from Nitsan Chorev, J.P. Pardo-Guerra, and Greta Krippner, followed by a reply from Marion and myself. (Here’s a PDF of the exchange .) There’s also a symposium at the Journal of Cultural Economy with contributions from Hatim A. Rahman , Juan M. del Nido , Julien Migozzi , and Michelle…
This past September I gave the closing keynote at posit::conf ; it’s now on YouTube to watch. Keen-eyed observers will note from the title that it’s about trustworthy data visualization. But it’s also about trust a bit more generally, and how we should think about it in a world where researchers are faking results, AIs are enthusiastically confabulating, and government is…
Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election gave me the opportunity to draw a few maps, and also to learn a bit about incorporating additional spatial data into maps drawn in R. R is not a specialized piece of GIS software. ESRI’s ArcGIS is the 800lb gorilla in this world and QGIS the GIMP to its Photoshop, so to speak. Still, you can do a lot of spatial stuff in R,…
Trends in the immameco question. Release 2 of the 2024 GSS cross-section and 1972-2024 culumative data are now available . I’ve updated gssr and gssrdoc to incorporate them. There are quite a few changes in the data and variables, thanks in part to some changes in data collection methods and a privacy/disclosure review. The gssr and gssrdoc packages are the nicest way to get General Social…
Here I continue my efforts to design visualizations that are as poorly-suited as possible to being displayed on phones. It looks pretty good on a big monitor, or six feet wide on a wall. I made a version of this plot a few years ago. I ended up revisiting it this morning because I’m updating various datasets and code. A Manhattan plot is a term sometimes used to describe a kind of scatter…
Regular readers know that I maintain gssr and gssrdoc , two packages for R . The former makes the General Social Survey ’s annual, cumulative and panel datasets available in a way that’s easy to use in R. The latter makes the survey’s codebook available in R’s integrated help system in a way that documents every GSS variable as if it were a function or object in R, so you…
If you want to print out a poster for October 18th , here are two; fully-guaranteed countrywide but maybe especially suitable for in and around New York. Two signs to display Here’s a direct link to the No King Anytime JPG and the Two Term Limit JPG. These are available as PDFs, as well (vector outlines; no worries about fonts): here’s the No King Anytime PDF and the Two Term Limit…
Last year I wrote about cleaning some data from the NHTSA FARS database , the system that tracks information about road accidents in the United States. I did that again this year for my Modern Plain Text Computing class. I won’t repeat the cleaning details, which are more or less the same. One question is how to aggregate data like this, if at all, and how to draw a picture of it. There are,…
I’m teaching my Modern Plain Text Computing course this semester and so I’m on the lookout for small examples that I can use to show some of the ordinary techniques we regularly use when working with tables of data. One of those is just coming up with some example data to illustrate something else, like how to draw a plot or fit a model or what have you. This is partly what the stock…
Marion and I have an essay in Aeon today: What is happening here is more than an abstract flow of information. It is more than a means of surveillance. It is more than a price mechanism. Rather, it’s as if the air traffic control and insurance commission functions of the IBM 650 have been fused, shrunk, and wholly generalised. This is the real computing revolution. Much of what we do is…
ChatGPT 5 was released today . ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has unveiled the long-awaited latest version of its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, GPT-5, saying it can provide PhD-level expertise. Billed as “smarter, faster, and more useful,” OpenAI co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman lauded the company’s new model as ushering in a new era of ChatGPT. “I think having…