Exploring Data Visualization #9 – Commons Knowledge: Insights from the Scholarly Commons

In this monthly series, I share a combination of cool data visualizations, useful tools and resources, and other visualization miscellany. The field of data visualization is full of experts who publish insights in books and on blogs, and I’ll be using this series to introduce you to a few of them. You can find previous posts by looking at the Exploring Data Visualization tag.

Map of election districts colored red or blue based on predicted 2018 midterm election outcome — This map breaks down likely outcomes of the 2018 Midterm elections by district.

Seniors at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland created the ORACLE of Blair 2018 House Election Forecast, a website that hosts visualizations that predict outcomes for the 2018 Midterm Elections. In addition to breakdowns of voting outcome by state and district, the students compiled descriptions of how the district has voted historically and what are important stances for current candidates. How well do these predictions match up with the results from Tuesday?

A chart showing price changes for 15 items from 1998 to 2018 — This chart shows price changes over the last 20 years. It gives the impression that these price changes are always steady, but that isn’t the case for all products.

Lisa Rost at Datawrapper created a chart—building on the work of Olivier Ballou—that shows the change in the price of goods using the Consumer Price Index. She provides detailed coverage of how her chart is put together, as well as making clear what is missing from both hers and Ballou’s chart based on what products are chosen to show on the graph. This behind-the-scenes information provides useful advise for how to read and design charts that are clear and informative.

An image showing a scale of scientific visualizations from figurative on the left to abstract on the right. — There are a lot of ways to make scientific research accessible through data visualization.

Visualization isn’t just charts and graphs—it’s all manner of visual objects that contribute information to a piece. Jen Christiansen, the Senior Graphics Editor at Scientific American, knows this well, and her blog post “Visualizing Science: Illustration and Beyond” on Scientific American covers some key elements of what it takes to make engaging and clear scientific graphics and visualizations. She shares lessons learned at all levels of creating visualizations, as well as covering a few ways to visualize uncertainty and the unknown.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email the Scholarly Commons.