This question forms the perfect title for this blog post, since it is the first question on the back of the book “The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data” written by Sir David Spiegelhalter. I first learned about David Spiegelhalter when I watched his keynote at the UK Tableau Conference in London in 2017. His […]
Recent Posts
Why do I use flowers to visualise data?
My most recent visualisation could probably be described as an unnecessary visualisation but that’s never stopped me before. I was looking to visualise information on the Premier League and the changing squads of each of the twenty teams, and I chose to represent the teams using flowers: Click through to the online version to toggle […]
What is the difference between typeface and font?
Last year, I hosted a Fireside Chat with the Data Visualization Society on Typography for Data Visualisation. You can see the full discussion below – I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and emerged with a new enthusiasm and determination to learn more about how I could make the right font design decisions in my data visualisations. […]
Why have I left it so late to talk about procrastination?
For every post I write, there is a post I don’t write. This, for example, below, in my WordPress instance, is telling me that I have nine draft posts (although, in my defence, this that you’re reading now is currently one of them). These nine unwritten posts go back about four years, and believe me, […]
Can you create a county level tile map for the USA?
Yes you can, I’ve done it – at least I’ve done it for the lower 48 states. The better questions to consider are “Should you …?”, or maybe “What are the pros and cons of such a map type”. Or perhaps “How on earth did you do it?” and the related “Why?” First of all, […]
When is a book more than just a book?
The answer, of course, is when it is a portal to the universe. I could stop there, but that wouldn’t do justice to this as a book review, my first of several promised for 2021. I’ve chosen to review “I am a book. I am a portal to the universe” for many reasons. Firstly, it’s […]
What does 2021 have in store?
I’m often reticent about New Year’s Resolution type posts – posts which list things that people will do in order to enhance their careers or fulfil their potentials. One the one hand they are great for focusing on goals which may have gone somewhat astray in the previous year, but on the other hand they […]
Why create an unnecessary data visualisation?
This post is inspired by this recent publication (note – I started and procrastinated on the post weeks ago, so I’ll edit this to “fairly recent”) publication from Andy Kirk. Many of you will know him for running visualisingdata.com with its regular feast of industry related resources, or will have benefitted from his book or […]
How do you create 31 visualisations in a month?
Some might say, the question should be “Why …” – and I don’t have an answer to that, other than to describe my thought processes from my last post, on the first day of May, where I set myself this challenge. A visualisation a day, all on the theme of one album. Did I complete […]