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. I believe that once you understand the concepts, you can use any tool - even a pencil and piece of paper - to implement your design. Click this button to learn more.
In recent weeks there’s been a kerfuffle about data coming out of the government. Specifically the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revised its forecast of the number of jobs created in May and June 2025 by about 125,000 jobs per month. This led President Trump to fire the Chief of the BLS. Obviously, it’s critical to have trustworthy data from the government to understand the state of the economy, assess effectiveness of programs, and track the overall health of society. Political firings of people implementing SOPs is jarring. Beyond the politics, the NY Times again had a visualization that I found interesting. There are a few things in this figure that I found interesting and that I am curious to try out in R with First, this plot is a stacked bar chart. I really like the use of negative space for the number of jobs that were over projected in May and June. I’d start by making sure the data are in a tidy format with a column for the date (first of each month month and year between July 2024 and July 2025), a column for the number of jobs, and a column to indicate whether the number of jobs is from firm estimate or over projection. With this structure, we could use Second, I really liked the use of color. For the preceding months and years the firm numbers are in gray while the projected extra numbers are white. But for July 2025 the number is in orange. This would mean that we need three values in the indicator column. We could use Third, there’s a couple of instances of annotation in the plot. The first that catches my eyes is the italicized “REVISED DOWN” over the bars for May and June 2024. I’d likely do this with Finally, in classic New York Times fashion the y-axis labels are on top of the horizontal grid lines. It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I suspect I’d again use What do you think of this visualization? Did you notice anything that I’ve glossed over? How would you go about implementing that flourish?
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Hey folks! I’m in proposal writing mode again. Unfortunately, I am finding my weekly search for a data visualization to share with you is leading me down unproductive internet rabbit holes. So, I thought I’d share an idea with you that I hope resonates. If you have any reactions, please send them my way! For the past year or so I have been recreating other people’s data visualizations in an attempt to learn new techniques with R and expand the type of data that I normally visualize. The idea...
Hey folks! Here in the US, vaccines continue to be a hot button issue. I feel like this issue is really an amalgamation of multiple issues including the decline in respect for authority figures, frustration with COVID, inability to assess risk at a personal level, and parents feeling like they are losing rights. Do people really want their kids to get sick unnecessarily? I doubt it. It’s also in the news because the Secretary of Health and Human Services is a vaccine skeptic/denier with many...
Hey folks! Sorry for the hiatus in getting you a newsletter into your inbox. The end of the summer/beginning of the academic year has been pretty chaotic. Actually, I had what I thought would be an interesting plot to recreate, but then I wasn’t able to find the original data and I wasn’t really interested in simulating it. Oh well. I’m also finding it hard to come up with interesting data visualizations from out in the wild. One of my go-to’s, Philip Bump, stopped working for the Washington...