The last week has been the overload of presentations, participation and socialising that is the annual Tableau Conference – ubiquitously known as #TC18. As 17000 people descended on New Orleans it represented an amazing opportunity to learn, meet new and existing friends and be inspired for the future. And, what an amazing city to host […]
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How do we visualise music?
This post follows on from my recent entry to the latest Tableau IronViz feeder competition. The brief – build a viz in Tableau that “somehow touches on the theme of water”. I decided to take the tangential approach: Handel’s Water Music I’d been interested in looking at how we could visualise music for a while, […]
When are multiple visualisations better than one?
This post is partly inspired by a recent post from Ben Jones explaining his love for dot plots here. Like Ben, I do enjoy dot plots, and it got me thinking that it would be good to go back to basics from the point of view of a data visualisation blog: when was the last […]
Haven’t I seen this somewhere before?
This post is thinking about those situations where you produce a visualisation that looks remarkably like another visualisation, whether that was the intention or not. It’s a hot topic, and with so many people entering the field it’s an issue that comes up more and more often. I think there are three separate situations that […]
How do you go about competitive data visualising?
It’s been a while since my last post (for me, anyway). Partly because I’ve been busy, and partly because I’ve been procrastinating a bit. The usual kind of reasons. But another key reason is that I had a half-written blog post which hasn’t really been going anywhere. So this represents a bit of a re-write […]
How important is feedback?
This post is on my to-do list to write tonight, because I’m keen to share my thoughts on the subject based around a couple of my recent visualisations. But it’s pertinent that I was in a training course today at work (edit: earlier this week, it’s taken me a while to finish this!) – nothing […]
Where can I get hard to find datasets?
Often for personal visualisation projects, the hardest part can be getting hold of an interesting or relevant dataset. I’m not talking about the drudgery of cleaning or reshaping data for your chosen visualisation tool, which we know can also be difficult and/or time-consuming, but of actually getting hold of data in the first place. Currently […]
What questions would you like me to talk about?
Next month, on 3rd-5th July (exact time and date tbc), I’ve been accepted to speak at the Tableau Conference in London. I’ve decided to theme my talk along with this blog, so my idea is to talk for about 10 minutes on each of 4-5 questions, with a few minutes left over at the end […]
Why is sport such a good topic for visualisations?
Sport visualisations won’t be for everyone, but I do think that the debate on this question is quite simple. Sports by their nature are full of numbers and data: times, goals, scores, dates, rankings, statistics, averages, records, tables, and the like. Most of these are not too difficult to get hold of, either via Wikipedia […]