When social scientists like me have lots of data, we tend to put it in tables. There’s nothing wrong with tables. They contain infinite details within a finite and teeny space, and they give the reader freedom to draw his or her own conclusions about which details…
Does data visualization leave you feeling like this? If so, this beginner-level post is for you! Data visualization requires two skillsets: technical skills to create visualizations in a software program and critical thinking skills to match your visualization to your audience’s information needs, numeracy level,…
Lately I’ve been feeling let down by summary statistics: the min and max, mean and median, quartiles and standard deviation… They do their job well enough. Summary statistics tell a summary. An aggregate story, bringing all the messy scores together into some sort of cohesion. We…
I’ve been in love with diverging stacked bar charts since I saw Joe Mako’s submission to Cole Nussbaumer’s dataviz challenge last December. Joe made this contest-winning chart. But in Tableau! The amazing but expensive software! Could I ever create one in Excel?! Yes! Luckily I’d…
Last week I shared strategies for improving any chart’s colors. One of the examples was a diverging stacked bar chart: I love stacked bar charts because they’re pretty versatile, and because they’re a great chart for lots of evaluation and survey data. In my example,…