News and Notes from PolicyViz - Issue #7
News and Notes from PolicyViz - Issue #7
Passing of a Data Visualization Legend
Leland Wilkinson passed away last Friday in Chicago, Illinois. Wilkinson was a statistician and computer scientist, and had developed the SYSTAT statistical package in the early 1980s when it was bought by SPSS. He also worked at Skytree, Inc. and Tableau Software before joining H20.ai and adjuncting at Northwestern University and University of Illinois at Chicago. You probably best know him as the author of The Grammar of Graphics, which was the foundational work for the ggplot2 package in R.
I was fortunate to get to know Lee over the past year. We served together on a technical panel for the National Center for Education Statistics earlier this year and then kept in touch over the next few months. He was kind enough to be a guest on my podcast in September and we had a lovely conversation about his work and career. (Jessica Hullman wrote a lovely piece about him on Sunday.)
I'll admit that when I went into the first meeting of the Technical Panel work, I was worried that Lee might be like so many of the old economists I know--only talking about their own work, their legacy, and their impact. But, wow, I was wrong! Of course, he explained how his work and the origins of that work (primarily, but not only, the Grammar of Graphics) contribute to our understanding of data visualization, but I think he probably spent most of his time elevating other people's work, highlighting their accomplishments, and praising the new generation of visualization researchers and practitioners. He was clearly still involved in the field and knew the new trends, tools, and methods. And he had a ton of stories about others in the field over the past decades, which served as fun fodder for our lunchtime chats.
And through all of our conversations and debates and loooong meetings and emails to get that report out the door, I don't think I ever saw him without a smile. Again, I didn't know him all that well, but from what I've heard, that's what he was like.
The world lost a luminary in the field this past week and I feel fortunate to have been given the opportunity to talk to him, at least for a little bit.
Take care,
Jon
Podcast Episode #207: Tom Mock
Tom Mock is the Customer Enablement Lead at RStudio, helping RStudio's customers successfully leverage open source data science tooling and RStudio's Professional products. He is the founder of #TidyTuesday, a weekly data science and data visualization learning community project. He maintains themockup.blog, a technical blog highlighting use cases and how-tos with R and the tidyverse. You can find him engaging with the community on Twitter at @thomas_mock. When he's not at his computer, he's seeking out the best churros or playing with his Boston Terrier, Howard.
What I'm Reading
I have a lot on my reading list. I'll see if I can make a dent in it during the holiday break. I've put links to each book below, in case you just want to click and buy.
Books
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Need a goal for 2022? Learn more graphs!
Video Series: One Chart at a Time. More than 50 videos from experts in the field of data visualization, who walk you through different graphs one at a time.
Book: Better Data Visualizations. My 2021 book that explores best practices for data visualization and has more than 500 graph examples to help you on your way.
Collection: Data Visualization Catalog. My collection of more than 1200 graphs to explore. You can also download the entire catalog (for free!) if you want to have the library on your own machine.