Hey folks! I’d love to have you join me in September for a new approach to teaching workshops that I will be rolling out. For five weeks I’ll be working with two cohorts of you all to improve our data visualization skills. Each week we’ll meet for a two-hour session. These sessions will include instruction on principles and concepts in data visualization and an opportunity to apply this information to visualizations we find in the wild or that you bring to the group. By not talking about...
17 days ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, Are you interested in uping your data visualisation skills? I’m rolling out a new program to help you improve the design of your data visualizations. This program will last 5 weeks starting at the beginning of September. Each session will be two hours long and include a discussion of data visualization principles followed by an opportunity to apply these ideas to your own visualizations. There will be no coding in this program so you can focus more on concepts than implementation....
24 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, I’m really excited to announce a new program to help you improve the design of your data visualizations. I emailed you about this earlier in the week, so I’ll keep this reminder brief. This data visualization makeover program will last 5 weeks starting at the beginning of September. Each two-hour session will include a discussion of data visualization principles and strategies followed by an opportunity to apply these ideas to your own visualizations. There will be no coding in...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, Are you looking for more personalized support and coaching to help you develop your data analysis skills? Are you looking for help in leading a data science team where your folks aren’t super proficient in analyzing data? Let me know what you’re looking for and we can discuss how I might be able to help you. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be a free service. But, I’m confident I can help you get over the challenges that are keeping you from creating data analyses and visualizations...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, We had another great livestream on Wednesday building a figure from the Washington Post. I talked about this plot last month in the newsletter as being a faceted waffle plot. We had a lot of fun building the figure! I didn’t think we’d get to it, but we even came up with a clever approach to making the non-uniform circles to depict each response to the WP’s survey. You’ll have to watch the livestream to see how we did it. I have really enjoyed the interaction with the people who...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hey folks, I’ve now produced three livestream videos. What do you think? Do you watch them live or watch them later? Or are they too long? I’m looking for honest feedback! I have to admit that if I hadn’t livestreamed these videos, they would not have been produced. It’s nice that I can more or less record and post without any editing. This is still a bit of an experiment. I think fewer people are watching the episodes which makes me worry that this might be an overall step backwards for you...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hey folks! Do you ever get that feeling where you’re scared to try something? But then you do it anyway… and it turns out way better than you expected? Well that was me on Wednesday morning. I ran my first livestream on YouTube recreating a ridgeline plot from Our World in Data showing the US baby boom. I wrote about it here in the newsletter back in May. The full session was about 2.5 hours. YouTube tells me that 272 people popped in at some point during the session. To be honest, I really...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, I need your feedback on an idea! Don’t worry, there’s some visualization stuff at the bottom. I had a video nearly ready to post this week using a ridgeline plot to show the baby boom. I think I did a great job of recreating the plot. But through a series of unfortunate events, I lost the video. I actually recorded the video three times because my computer kept crashing as I was recording it. This was on top of increasing busyness on my part with teaching, proposal writing,...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, I really enjoyed teaching a one-day, introduction to ggplot2 workshop last week. It was a lot of fun - I enjoyed teaching the principles behind ggplot2. I’ve been noticing many learners (and teachers) focusing on making templates that they can recycle to make variations on a common plot type. This is how I often teach ggplot2 and the rest of the tidyverse - it’s also how I learned R. In the most recent workshop I was testing a hypothesis that teaching concepts would yield more long...
4 months ago • 3 min read
