Data Curious (2019.09.09): What is visualization research?
data / curious
2019.09.09
Good morning.
I've got lots of really great articles to read this week on visualization research, and a few interesting tutorials to dive into. Also, an open database of structured Shakespeare data!
Let's dive in/.
Read_
How should we visualize uncertainty?
Jessica Hullman summarizes her research on showing uncertainty in data visualization in this article for Scientific American. Each method (ranked from least effective, to most) includes a visual example on how to do it best. A must read this week.
What is visualization research? What should it be?
Loved this one. "At base, visualization is a method for contextualizing data, enabling people to apply their prior experiences and perceptual and cognitive abilities to draw conclusions about phenomena in the real world." Read on. (Psst...again, Jessica Hullman! can you tell I just found her and think she's great?).
How an I promote my data work on Instagram?
Check out this piece of self-reflection from the maker of @the.wine.nerd, an Instagram account dedicated to visualizing wine data. In case you're wondering, it's appropriately called "What putting graphs on Instagram has taught me about data science".
What did I miss at EYEO Festival this year?
Technically this one is "watch". If you missed out on this year's premo visualization conference (I did), all the talks were just uploaded to Vimeo here.
Explore_
How do commute times differ for men and women?
Check out this cool interactive data tool from the ONS to find out (this Twitter thread includes a helpful preview).
How many plastic bottles are we wasting each second?
Reuters released a new interactive story on the excessive waste of plastic generated by single-use bottles. Explore the mind-bending animations and scale of our plastic addiction: we are drowning in plastic.
Analyze_
How can I find and analyze data on Shakespeare's plays?
Theatre buffs, you're in luck. The Drama Corpora Project is an interative database of over 800 plays in five different languages. Each play has a network graph of characters and a download section with network data in CSV and GEFX, along with text data in TXT and JSON. Here's an example with Love's Labor's Lost. So much data! And all it structured!
Learn_
How can I learn D3.js?
A big question. This interactive page/blog post explains how d3 is actually a collection of much smaller modules. It doesn't have to be so scary.
How can I find and visualize the personalities of movie characters?
Check out this fascinating walkthrough on how to use open data, IBM Watson and a little bit of Python to plot the personality profile of thousands of movie characters (this one uses Gandalf).
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