From Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: A large share of ink on a graphic should present data-information, the ink changing as the data change. Data-ink is the non-erasable core of a graphic, the non-redundant ink arranged in response to variation in the numbers represented. Then, Data-ink ratio = data-ink / total ink used to […]
Articles
Hans Rosling as a performer.
I think we tend to undervalue Hans Rosling as a performer while hyping his data visualization. When you first watched his early *TED talks did you think, “Maybe I should create a bubble chart?” Or did you think, “I wish I could captivate an audience like that?” Originally for me it was the former and […]
Doggie Data Science on the 4th of July
Happy Fourth of July!
Austin Kleon on how to get inspiration to strike.
Austin Kleon was on Kelton Reid’s The Writer Files podcast. He said this when talking about writers block. It sparked today’s cartoon. Problems of output are problems of input.
Letting Pixar’s rules of storytelling influence your reporting.
I really believe that good data visualization, good reporting and good presentations are all about good storytelling. So I tend to search out inspiration from great storytellers. I read the post I quote below a few years ago, but find myself coming back to it over and over again. As researchers and evaluators we spend a […]
The big reason to stop coloring maps
From Let’s Tesselate: Hexagons For Tile Grid Maps by Danny DeBelius of the npr visuals team: As the saying goes, nothing is certain in this life but death, taxes and requests for geographic data to be represented on a map. For area data, the choropleth map is a tried and true visualization technique, but not without significant dangers […]





