Author Archives: Megan Ozeran

Exploring Data Visualization #7

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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.

A collection of six different radar charts, each showing one student's test scores in multiple subjects

From “The Radar Chart and its Caveats” by Yan Holtz

1) Data analyst Yan Holtz and designer Conor Healy have helpfully compiled a list of visualization caveats at their site From Data to Viz. Among the common pitfalls in data visualization they discuss the use of radar charts, as in the image above.

Two elementary school floor plans generated by computer modeling, optimized to minimize traffic flow between classes and material usage. The floor plans look biological, with the hallways branching to smaller hallways and the rooms shaped as all sorts of polygons instead of rectangular.

From “Evolving Floorplans,” created by Joel Simon

2) Bioinformaticist Joel Simon “grew” an elementary school floor plan using advanced computer science methods. As he points out, “The results were biological in appearance, intriguing in character and wildly irrational in practice.” The project certainly demonstrates that computer models are only as good as the data that humans give them (in this case, there were no constraints based on architecture or engineering rules). On the other hand, imagine your school was laid out like this! Read all about the project at Simon’s website.

A demonstration of a chart makeover. The before chart shows two pie charts. Each slice of the pie chart is the percentage of U.S. population within an age group. The first pie chart is 2010, the second is 2013. The makeover, or "after" chart, is a slope graph that shows the change in millions of people within each age group, which are each represented by a line.

Chart makeover created by Patricia Manasan for Storytelling With Data

3) Want to feel inspired? Dozens of people submitted data visualization makeovers to Storytelling With Data. Take a look at what people changed for ideas about how to make your own visualizations better.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email me and set up an appointment at the Scholarly Commons.

Exploring Data Visualization #6

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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.

U.S. immigration represented by concentric rings like a tree, where outermost ring is the most recent, with colors denoting immigrants' origin primarily by continent

from National Geographic, “200 Years of U.S. Immigration Looks Like the Rings of a Tree”

1) Two Northeastern University professors visualized immigration data for National Geographic by creating a fascinating chart that looks a lot like the growth rings of a tree. They write, “Like countries, trees can be hundreds, even thousands, of years old. Cells grow slowly, and the pattern of growth influences the shape of the trunk. Just as these cells leave an informational mark in the tree, so too do incoming immigrants contribute to the country’s shape.”

two line graphs, one with a legend and one with direct line labeling, demonstrating the advantage of the latter

from StorytellingWithData, “Accessible data viz is better data viz”

2) Accessibility is important in all kinds of communication, and data visualization is no exception. But it’s not always obvious how to make visualizations more accessible. You can find several tips for improving your visualization in “Accessible data viz is better data viz.”

Polar histograms of the streets in major cities across the U.S.

by Geoff Boeing, “Comparing City Street Orientations”

3) Urban planning postdoc Geoff Boeing used open map data to create a series of polar histograms that demonstrate how the streets in various U.S. cities do or don’t follow a neat grid. It’s a great example of a visualization that looks intriguing and also packs a lot of information. Learn more about it in his blog post, Comparing City Street Orientations.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email me and set up an appointment at the Scholarly Commons.

Exploring Data Visualization #5 – R edition

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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.

This month, I wanted to share some resources specifically for learning to visualize data using R.

1) R is a free, open source programming language that is heavily used for statistical analysis, but has also expanded to encompass nearly any kind of data analysis you would want to do. In the Scholarly Commons, we have R and RStudio (a user-friendly R development environment) installed on all of our lab computers. RStudio’s website provides links to a lot of ways for you to get started with R.

2) R guru Hadley Wickham gave a public lecture at the University of Notre Dame last August. (Note that his talk starts about 37 minutes into the video.) In the lecture, he walks through a simple example of the iterative process of data visualization in R, and gives additional related advice for doing data science. You can learn from his lecture without knowing any R, but you will find it easier to understand if you have basic experience with programming in general.

3) If you want a book to help you learn more in depth, Wickham and a colleague wrote R for data science: Import, tidy, transform, visualize, and model data. You can read R for data science online, or you can come in to the Scholarly Commons to read the physical book while practicing on one of our lab computers.

4) You can also find a number of specific R courses at Lynda.com, such as “Data Visualization in R with ggplot2.” Just make sure to log in with your U of I credentials so you can access the courses for free.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email me and set up an appointment at the Scholarly Commons.

Exploring Data Visualization #4

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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.

Welcome back to this blog series! Here are some of the things I read in May:

a cartoon image of a few buildings, above two cartoon characters, one who is pointing and saying "We missed people here," while the other character shrugs and says "We can't do anything about it"

from Alvin Chang at Vox, “How Republicans are undermining the 2020 census, explained with a cartoon”

1) Alvin Chang, Senior Graphics Reporter at Vox, “covers policy by making explainers with charts and cartoons.” This month he explained the precarious state of the upcoming 2020 U.S. Census.

a dual-axis line chart overlaid with a stick figure drawing of a confused person misreading the chart's data

from Lisa Charlotte Rost at Uncharted, “Why not to use two axes, and what to use instead”

2) Lisa Charlotte Rost, a designer for Datawrapper, explains why dual-axis charts are almost always terrible, and what you can use instead.

text saying "The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds," surrounded by a cartoon rendering of a network graph

“The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds,” a game created by Nicky Case

3) Play this cute game! Nicky Case combines the logic of network graphs with the science of crowds in an “explorable” that shows why some crowds generate wisdom, while others create madness.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email me and set up an appointment at the Scholarly Commons.

Exploring Data Visualization #3

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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.

Welcome back to this blog series! Here are some of the things I read in April:

a photograph of a knit pattern in a very strange shape, using green yarn

“Make Caows and Shapcho” pattern knit by MeganAnn (https://www.ravelry.com/projects/MeganAnn/skyknit-the-collection)

1) Janelle Shane, who has created a new kind of humor based on neural networks, trained a neural network to generate knitting patterns. Experienced knitters then attempted these patterns so we can see what the computer generated, ranging from reasonable to silly to downright creepy creations.

map showing that many areas of the United States get their first leaf earlier than in the past

from NASA Earth Observatory, “Spring is Arriving Earlier in National Parks”

2) Considering we had snowfall in April, you might not think spring began early this year (I know I don’t!). But broadly speaking, climate change has caused spring to begin earlier and earlier across the United States. The NASA Earth Observatory looked at data published in 2016 to create maps that visualize how climate change has changed the timing of spring.

3) If you want to learn a new tool but aren’t sure what to choose, have a look at Nathan Yau’s suggestions in his post What I Use to Visualize Data. He even divides his list into categories based on where he is in the process, such as initial data processing versus final visualizations.

Exploring Data Visualization #2

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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.

Welcome back to this blog series! Here are some of the things I read in March:

Chart showing that the sons of black families from the top 1 percent had about the same chance of being incarcerated on a given day as the sons of white families earning $36,000

From The New York Times, “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys”

1) The New York Times took data from a recent study about income inequality and designed a variety of compelling data visualizations. The article text and the visualizations complement each other to convey the pervasive insidiousness of racism, especially for black boys.

A chart legend with the categories

From Elijah Meeks, “Color Advice for Data Visualization with D3.js”

2) D3.js is an open JavaScript library that you can use to visualize data. A data visualization engineer at Netflix (what an interesting job!), Elijah Meeks provides some great advice when picking your colors in D3. More importantly, these tips are helpful no matter what visualization tool you use.

A demonstration of selecting bins for histograms, showing too few, too many, and just the right number

From Mikhail Popov, “Plotting the Course Through Charted Waters”

3) Want to learn some data visualization basics? Mikhail Popov from Wikimedia conducted a data visualization literacy workshop for Wikimedia Foundation’s All Hands 2018 staff conference, and he made the entire workshop available online.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email me and set up an appointment at the Scholarly Commons.

Exploring Data Visualization

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Hi everyone! As mentioned in an earlier post, I’m Megan Ozeran, the Data Analytics & Visualization Librarian in the Scholarly Commons. In this new monthly series, I will 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.

To jump-start this series, here are a few items for February:

A Tableau dashboard analyzing baseball data with regard to African American players

Created by Yoshihito Kimura, “African American baseball players have consisitently [sic] contributed to win”

1) data.world hosted weekly data visualization events related to Black History Month. See the data and the visualizations that people have created by clicking on the dataset links on their Black History Month page. The visualization above was contributed to the Baseball Demographics project.

A movie passes the Lena Waithe Test if there's a black woman in the work, who's in a position of power, and she's in a healthy relationship.

From FiveThirtyEight, “The Next Bechdel Test”

2) FiveThirtyEight, known for telling data-rich stories with visualizations, has made it easier than ever to download their data. For instance, you can download the data behind their article “The Next Bechdel Test” and experiment with how you might visualize it differently.

An 8-bit graphic of a millennial with the caption, "Follow me as I make my way toward a stable financial future."

From HuffPost, “FML”

3) “Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.” This long, intense article combines writing and data visualization in a brand new way. I recommend viewing it in a computer browser because the mobile version may not be as easy to read.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email me and set up an appointment at the Scholarly Commons.