Over the years I’ve noticed that many of the most influential thinkers carry with them some great metaphors to help describe their work. It also makes for great cartoon fodder. Today’s cartoon inspired by Michael Quinn Patton from his book on Developmental Evaluation: Distinguished evaluation theorist and practitioner Bob Stake has explained, “When the cook tastes the soup, […]
Human Side of Data
There is this tendency to get wrapped up in tech. If only we had that cool new dashboard or visual. Then we could really take advantage of our data. Of course the actual tech part is not everything. Not anywhere close. Sure, the tech stuff can be neat, but the human side is the […]
Eleanor Chelimsky on who evaluators are
After posting his guest post two weeks ago on the 4 missing ps in evaluation, Rakesh Mohan received a comment via email from Eleanor Chelimsky. For the non evaluators, Eleanor Chelimsky has been incredibly influential to the field in both words and practice, having directed the Program Evaluation and Methodology Division of the U.S. Government Accountability Office […]
Baby’s first logic model
Evaluation power couple, and conference friends, David and Amy Shellard are expecting a little one this year. One of their close friend’s reached out to me looking for a cartoon to go on a onesie. I happily responded with this one. Dave sent out a tweet the other day and I quickly had a few […]
Minimum Viable Explanation – cartoon flashback
Today’s cartoon flashback comes from a big Q&A post on blogging I pulled together a couple of years ago. Specifically from Nathan Yau‘s response when asked about his biggest blogging challenge. The biggest challenge with FlowingData is probably maintaining the right balance between academic and casual. If I get too technical, I confuse a lot […]
Professionalizing Evaluation
Like many evaluators I just kind of fell into the field from a career in research (my MA is in sociology). One day I found myself in a non-profit data position doing evaluation work. Then over the years I’ve learned more and more about the field through a lot of self-initiated learning, experience and participation in […]
Too many sustainable development goals or too few
The age-old question, how many goals should we have? I’m not really caught up on the overall discussion regarding the sustainable development goals, but the following sparked today’s cartoon. This quote is from Tom Murphy in No surprises in U.N. draft for next global development goals: The draft document for the goals that will set the global development […]
Ban Powerpoint… or Not
The way I see it, Power Point is not a presentation tool. It is a presentation illustration tool. And Power Point is designed in a way that leads you toward illustrating a presentation using bullet points. It can most certainly be used by great presentation illustrators to help support great presentations. But most of the time, […]
Data fluency and the last mile
I think the last mile analogy below will resonate with many of you. Sometimes it seems like we spend so much time planning, collecting and analyzing that the final piece almost becomes an afterthought. But if you really want the data to be used, you need to put in some real effort at the end. […]
Data Science versus Evaluation
Data science vs evaluation is a false dichotomy. Because data science and evaluation (or research) are not mutually exclusive. Both data science and evaluation involve data. Depending on the purpose, occasionally there will be overlap. When data science is used to make judgements on the merit, worth or value of things it is evaluative. Most […]
Serious versus Solemn
If the things we want to share with the world are really as important as we think they are, then we should be pulling out all the stops to get them into the hands (and minds) of our intended audience. And yes, sometimes this means adding entertainment value. I’m talking evaluation, research, evidence, causes, problems, […]
Over-complicating causality – cartoon flashback
Since I have a lot of new followers, I thought it would be nice to put up some of my older cartoons from time to time. This one has long been one of my favorites, and I still see it popping up in presentations from time to time. The cartoon came from a post on […]