News and Notes from PolicyViz - Issue #5

Building a Data Visualization Style Guide Toolkit

Over the last few months, I've been meeting regularly with Max Graze, Amy Cesal, and Alan Wilson about building shareable, accessible, data visualization style guides. Data visualization style guides are standards for formatting and designing representations of information, like charts, graphs, tables, and diagrams, and we hope we are able to help more people and organizations build more and better style guides.

I've been working on data visualization style guides for several years now, starting with helping on the Urban Institute style guide several years ago, and current work on an update. I've also written and spoken widely about the importance of such guides. If you haven't seen it, I also have an open collection of style guides that you can explore to help you create your own.

We are still trying to figure out exactly what our working group is and what we are going to do. We have some ideas to conduct some research and outreach about style guides and best practices. If you'd like to be involved, check out the new website where we've got a couple of Google forms and other information.

Thanks,

Jon

Header image from the new dataviz style guides website.

Episode #205: Steve Franconeri and Jen Christiansen at VisComm

A different episode coming your way this week. as I moderated a discussion between Steve Franconeri, who is a professor at Northwestern University, and Jen Christiansen who is the senior graphics editor at Scientific American at the IEEE conference. The conversation was so interesting, talking about all the different ways that practitioners can learn from academics during the research, and the academic researchers could learn from practitioners in the field, that I thought I would repost an entire discussion here as an episode of the podcast.

We’re delighted to introduce the 2021 Data Literacy Awards shortlist candidates, chosen from among the nominations submitted by the general public over the past month. These exemplary candidates helped us speak the language of data even more fluently in 2021, and we’d like to congratulate all of them for being chosen from among their peers.

New Videos...

I've been a bit slow in getting back to making new videos for my YouTube channel, but I posted a few on Monday, so check them out. I've got a tutorial in Excel plus a few data visualization critiques. If there's information or tutorials you'd like to see, please reach out!

What I'm Reading

A few things I'm reading (or should be reading!) and think would be good additions to your reading lists.

Books

• Living in Data

• Data Visualization with Excel Dashboards and Reports

• A Dictionary Of Color Combinations

Research

• The Relationship Between Disability Insurance Receipt and Food Insecurity

Tweets, Articles, and Data Visualizations

• And this is why it’s useful to talk about historical examples of institutionalized racism

• Dashboards Are Not Data Stories

• An Extra Air Pollution Burden (includes a bivariate choropleth map)

• Clarity and Aesthetics in Data Visualization: Guidelines

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

November Sale at the Shop!

Everything at the PolicyViz shop is being marked off by 20% for the rest of November! Get your dataviz-related shirts, ebooks, masks, and more. Use the code "Holiday2021" to get the discount.

Check out the PolicyViz Data Visualization Catalog

Whether you know this by now or not, there is a wide array of graphs available to us when we communicate our data. We all know how to read line charts, bar charts, and pie charts–not because we are born with those skills but because we are taught how to read them as children and are exposed to them hundreds and hundreds of times. Learning which graphs work best for which audience is a key component of my data visualization classes and workshops (and my forthcoming book, Better Data Visualizations.)

Consider becoming a PolicyViz Patreon

The podcast is completely listener-supported. There are no ads on the show notes page or in the audio. If you would like to financially support the show, please check out my Patreon page, where just for a few bucks a month, you can get a sneak peek at guests and pose your own questions.