Consider Your Message When Choosing What Chart to Use
Different chart types emphasize different aspects of the data. I show a simple data set and plot it three simple ways to show that each emphasizes a different message. All use bar charts.
View ArticleComments on Ezra Klein's "Romney's and Obama's tax plans, in one chart"
Ezra Klein posted an article on the Washington Post’s Wonkblog entitled “Romney’s and Obama’s tax plans, in one chart.”
View ArticleIs the Word "Data" Singular or Plural?
I recently attended an event where many of the other guests worked in corporate communications. A professor lamented that many of today’s students brought up with text messages and Twitter don’t write...
View ArticleGraphs on Multiple Slides
This week I invited a guest blogger, Beth Lisberg Najberg, to share thoughts on using graphs in presentations. Beth and I have given joint presentations where I have spoken on better graphs and Beth...
View ArticleAnother Misleading Graph of Romney's Tax Plan
Fox News showed the following chart of Romney’s tax plan:
View ArticleSome Useful Statistical Blogs
A group of statistical bloggers had lunch together at the Joint Statistical Meetings in San Diego. I’ll post links to their blogs for those of you interested in resources in statistics. The luncheon...
View ArticleMust Zero Be Included on Scales of Graphs? Another Look at Fox News' Graph...
My August 4th post calls a graph from Fox News misleading since it is a bar graph with a non-zero baseline. The blog Fallacy Files credits my post as a source for its entry on graphs with no zero on...
View ArticleBill Clinton's Speech in Misleading Graphs
Sarah Kliff wrote a blog post including the length of Republican and Democratic National Convention remarks as prepared for delivery and as actually delivered. The problem is that she used misleading...
View ArticleHow To Exaggerate Trends in Graphs
I discussed whether zero needs to be included on all scales in a recent post, ending by saying, “Not including zero in the baseline is one way to exaggerate a trend for those who don’t read labels...
View ArticleMisleading Groups of Charts
Often we see groups of charts in which the individual charts are fine but the group misleads. In other cases, the individual charts have problems and the groupings make matters worse. The problem with...
View ArticleChoosing Colors for Graphs that are Accessible to Most Viewers
Many people don't realize that almost ten percent of the male population has some form of color vision deficiency. As a result, graph designers and software vendors regularly produce figures with...
View ArticleWhen Swapping Axes Improves Graph Design
Good Magazine along with Other Means published an interactive graphic discussing if America can be energy independent. A static view of it appears in Figure 1. Immediately you'll notice that the labels...
View ArticleTwo Opinions on the Usefulness of Pictographs
Pictographs or unit charts use pictures or symbols to represent the quantities of the variables shown. Figure 1 shows an example. This post shows the disagreement of two graph experts, Gregor Aisch and...
View ArticleConflicting Polls in a Flawed Graph
Thanks to Jason Oberholtzer (@ilovecharts) for tweeting about the following graph from the Boston Metro. His tweet just said, “Ugly polls.”
View ArticleNYC Data Week
This week is NYC Data Week, co-produced by the City of New York's Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) and O'Reilly Media's Strata + Hadoop World Conference. Multiple...
View ArticleAlways Count Your Pills
This is a bit off-topic, but it’s an important subject. We all know that if we are sick enough to need an antibiotic, we must finish the bottle or the harmful bacteria may return. I am without power...
View ArticlePublic Speaking Mistakes to Avoid
I often speak at conferences so I attend a large number of conference sessions. While not a public speaking professional, I know how I react as a member of the audience. Since I bet that many others...
View ArticleGraph Makeover Contest
We’ve all seen blog posts in which the author criticizes a chart or graph and then shows an alternative way of presenting the data. To vary things a bit, in this post I am going to present a graph and...
View ArticleLooking Back on My First Year of Blogging
It’s hard to believe that I have completed my first year of blogging. I’ve been posting approximately once a week and this is my 53rd post. It’s a good time to see where we’ve been and decide where we...
View ArticleAlternatives to the Pie/Donut Chart in the Graph Makeover Contest
What an outstanding group of readers I have! Both the quality and the quantity of entries to the Graph Makeover Contest were amazing. There were 29 entries to the first part of the contest which...
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