Hey folks! I just got back from a seminar. I’m still trying to stretch out my eyes from straining to see the small text on each slide! If you don’t know why I’m brining this up, then you must have missed the videos I posted earlier this week. I was discussing the factors we should consider when converting figures designed for papers to figures designed to a slide deck. You can see me critique a figure from my own lab here and the livestream where I refactor the figure can be found here. I’d...
9 days ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, I was a student-invited speaker at the Syracuse University Biology department this week. It was great to meet with them and hear how they are benefiting from these newsletters and my videos. As much as I love posting newsletters and videos, seeing people light up at ideas, laugh at my jokes, and tell me how they are using what I teach them is like jet fuel. I actually gave two talks. One talk covered what I’ve learned about data visualization by critiquing, recreating, and remaking...
16 days ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, If you missed Wednesday’s livestream, I encourage you to go back and check it out. I recreated a panel from a paper published in Nature that is pretty typical. It was made up entirely of photographs. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only PI that doesn’t merge panels into figures using Illustrator or Powerpoint. I prefer to use R with some help from {cowplot} or {patchwork} to do this for me. That way I can write a single script to generate the entire set of panels. The result is a...
23 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, This week I’ve been teaching one of my 3 day R workshops as part of my official teaching duties at the U of Michigan. I really enjoy teaching these classes! I offer recorded versions of these workshops that use microbiome data or other types of data to help motivate my teaching of R’s tidyverse packages. If you would like to purchase your own version of these workshop click on those links! Also, if you would like me to teach a live workshop to your group, reply to this email and...
30 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, If you missed it, on Wednesday I did a livestream where I made a stacked barplot and pronounced it good. No, I wasn’t drinking anything! But it’s a reminder to think about the question before finding the best data visualization strategy. I think this highlights the value of the constructive approach I’ve been trying to take to critiquing data visualizations. The first steps are to establish the question and figure out the question. If you aren’t a “regular”, I think you’re really...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Hey folks, As I mentioned last week, I’m exploring the possibility of holding live, in person, workshops again like I did before the pandemic. If this is something that interests you, please let me know. My thought would be to hold them at an affordable hotel near the Detroit airport (DTW). But, if you would like to host me to teach a workshop, I would be open to that as well. This week, I want to call your attention to a plot that I would not encourage you to make. This comes form “Targeted...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey folks! I’m hoping to host two workshops in March and April. The first would be a Zoom-based workshop on the principles of data visualization (I taught a version of this last month). This would be a code-free workshop and would run for about 3 hours. I don’t have a date yet. If you are interested, please reply to this email and let me know if there is a date and time in March that would work best for you. The second would be an in person 3 day workshop taught near the Detroit airport. I...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, We had a lot of fun last week with my first workshop on the theory of data visualization! If this is something that you’d be interested in participating in let me know. At this point, I don’t have anything scheduled. So, if you have suggestions for days or times, please let me know This week I have a fun figure to share with you from a paper recently published in Nature Microbiology, titled, “Candida auris skin tropism and antifungal resistance are mediated by carbonic anhydrase...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, Happy 2026! It’s great to be joining you on another trip around the sun as we explore data visualization, R, and reproducible research. Later today I’ll be hosting a workshop on the design of data visualizations. If you register ASAP, I can probably still get you in. If you missed this one, but would like to be notified when I run this workshop again, reply to this email and let me know! This week I found a pretty unique plot type in a paper published in the journal Nature This is...
3 months ago • 3 min read
