I’ve got a lot of dataviz skeletons in my closet. This beauty comes from my second week as an evaluator: Border, grid lines, tick marks…. A legend instead of direct labeling… A generic title instead of a “so what?” title… You get the idea. Today I…
I’ve been building portfolios of my work for a while. Over the past year or so I’ve been building an online portfolio of speaking and writing engagements. Before that, I collected paper copies of reports I worked on: Before The great sobering thing about portfolios is that…
This post has been a long time coming. Stephanie Evergreen and I knew some time ago that evaluators and social scientists had a thirst for better graphs, a clear understanding of why better graphs were necessary, but they lacked efficient guidance on how, exactly, to make…
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,…
You know the drill: Better charts = better communication = better understanding = better decision making. Whether you’re trying to highlight the most important findings, simplify that lengthy report, or just get someone to open your report in the first place, charts can be one…
![Four Steps: Social Network Analysis by Twitter Hashtag with NodeXL [Guest post by Johanna Morariu]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/sna.png)
Note from Ann: Today’s guest post is from Johanna Morariu, Director of Innovation Network, AEA DVRTIG Chair, and dataviz aficionado. Basic social network analysis is something EVERYONE can do. So let’s try out one social network analysis tool, NodeXL, and take a peek at the…
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,…
Colors can make or break a chart. Colors direct our eye movements, and therefore our brains and attention. It’s up to you: will you help or hinder your reader’s understanding? Here are some simple strategies for communicating clearly with chart color. Strategy 1: Select a…