Where Does Inspiration Come From?

As a kid, I used to fantasize about being able to transport myself anywhere with a blink and a nod like Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie or to clean my room with the wiggle of my nose like Samantha on Bewitched or to someday have Uhura's job from Star Trek.

Yes, it did seem like Uhura was a glorified switchboard operator (an un-glorified, mind-numbingly boring job that I did eventually do), but mostly I was fascinated by the computer screens all around her.

Since that time, I've continued to pay attention to the computer screens in Sci-Fi movies (never could get too excited about the panels in Star Wars) and the ones on Star Trek have gotten more and more intricate and beautiful over the years.

It seems I'm not the only one fascinated by Sci-Fi computer screens. There's websites dedicated to this strange fetish.

Building Dashboards for the Smartphone

This post was originally shared on Tableau's blog.

I rarely get requests for Tableau dashboards on smartphones, probably because they are usually a secondary concern. That is, most business dashboards don’t automatically translate well to the phone format, so they are not high on the priority list. Here are a few things I’ve learned when making these wee dashboards that might be of help to you. 

The Nuclear Energy Option

WE NEED MORE POWER!

The energy demand in developing countries like China and India is growing at a phenomenal pace. At the same time most countries are looking to reduce carbon emissions and their dependence on fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, there's no magical Scotty in engineering with the ability to bend the laws of physics and deliver that power without consequences. There is no perfect option.

I recently saw a documentary on nuclear energy called Pandora's Promise. It made a pretty compelling case for the nuclear option, but I wasn't completely convinced. So, I decided to find some data and look at it myself... because that's what analysts do.

Bad Charts Delight

I know you love them. C'mon, admit it. Pies, donuts, bubbles,... anything stacked or layered. You love 'em. We all do. There's something about these bad chart choices that are appealing to us. If they didn't tickle our insides we wouldn't see so many of them on infographics and dashboards.

Yet we know (yes, we do) that these are bad choices for conveying information. Our job as dashboard builders is to create a cohesive and accurate information message that can stand alone in a room without us there to interpret.

Finishing Touches to Avoid Clickin' Confusion

How often do you find users get confused clicking around on your viz? Surprisingly, a lot, right? You think it's fairly simple, just click to filter.  But most people double-click. Telling everyone not to double-click is pointless. So they double click and zoom in on a chart and are completely baffled as to how to get out of it (it's not entirely intuitive). Or they click on a chart that doesn't zoom, but it highlights and dims all the other values (which you don't want).

Steal and Nod

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation ~ MASON COOLEY

To better understand technique, many art students will at some time be given the task of replicating the masters. It's a great way to learn and is useful for learning dashboard design in Tableau as well.

The Tableau Public community share an incredible amount of tips and how-to's as well as some amazingly innovative and clever tricks. A lot of people I talk to don't realize that you can download most of the workbooks people have posted (just look for the download note on the bottom right of the viz) and that the author knows that their work is out there for all to see and have graciously agreed to share it with you. You can open the workbook and look behind the curtain to see how they worked their magic. It's not considered stealing, so long as you give credit (the nod).

So next time you see a viz of the day or a blog post with a cool viz, download it and try to replicate it with your data. It's a great exercise - you will find that your learning grows in leaps and bounds this way. I think we all learn something much better when we've struggled with it, rather than just having someone show or tell us how.

Bubble, Bubble, Oil and Trouble

There's a lot of news about the Keystone Pipeline lately. Will Obama give the go ahead or not? Man, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes. This is not a simple black and white issue. Disclaimer: I'm a Canadian born in Northern Alberta and I have a lot of family members who work in the oil and gas industry or who benefit from it. I'm not for or against the Keystone Pipeline, I'm seriously conflicted.

If you want to learn more about this issue, check out Leslie Young's series on Global News. She's done a heck of a job getting this data and the series isn't biased. Another good source is the Guardian (always best to go to Britain for unbiased North American news) or our beloved David Suzuki (who is one of the most credible environmental activists on the planet).

Canada's Electoral Voting Districts

Canada's next federal election isn't until October 2015, so this viz is almost 2 years too early.  But I was so excited to receive the shape files for the electoral districts yesterday that I had to play.


Big, HUGS to Zen men Allan Walker, and Craig Bloodsworth at The Information Lab and Adam Riley at Altyrx and  who created Tableau Mapping Monday and the central Tableaumappingbi repository for the shape files they've created.  There's also a LinkedIn mapping group for discussions.

UBC Magicians

Click to visit site

Today I was invited to talk with grad students in a course on Information Visualization and Visual Analytics  as part of  the Magic program at the University of British Columbia (UBC).  I had met the Director of the program (and CiFER Researrch), Dr. Vicki Lemieux, at the Tableau 8 Roadshow here in Vancouver in the spring and she had asked if I would come speak to her class about working in this field.  Vicki is one of those truly precious professors who are not only experts in their field and love it, but also love teaching and are brilliant at it.  She explained how the class runs; she usually presents some new information and then the students work in groups to further explore and share their new found knowledge.

Magic stands for Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre.  This is a great program which also offers students the opportunity to work with local business and government organizations:

Zombies Return!

Zombify Yourself App

Did you know it's Zombie Apocalypse week?  If you are Walking Dead fan you did.  This is my favorite month of the year; the leaves are turning, school's all in (ah, the sweet smell of school supplies), and old horror movies turn up on tv weeks before Halloween (my favorite holiday).

I especially love Halloween in Vancouver because chances are very good that the weather won't be too cold for the trick or treaters so people get crazy with costumes and neighbourhood decorations.  If you're in Vancouver, be sure to check out the Halloween Ghost Train ride in the park and Fright Night at Playland.  And here's one I haven't tried, but am dying to (well not really dying), The Zombie Syndrome: On Death Island.  Live Zombie theatre on Granville Island.  I say, doesn't that sound exciting.

Here's a silly zombie viz that I started at the Iron Viz and finally finished; Zombie TV and Movie ratings around the world.  See how your favorite Zombie show rates in other countries.

Replicating a New York Times d3.js Chart with Tableau

Click to view the interactive at the NYT by Shan Carter and Kevin Quealy

I am a huge, HUGE, fan of the visual design work created at the New York Times.  I have been following their work since Amanda Cox joined in 2005, when there was a noticeable change in the quality of visualizations.  (Here is an example of Amanda's process for the Facebook IPO piece in 2012.)

There's an amazing bunch of people on that design team - and they are very generous with sharing their expertise; you can follow their process at Chartsnthings.  Much of their interactive work is created with d3.js which I haven't learned and had always hoped that eventually I might be able to produce something similar with Tableau.

Well, I think I have.  It's not perfect, but it's close.

Google Online Takedown Requests: a Lesson in Extract Aggregations

CLICK ME!  CLICK ME!

Tis the season of visualization contests.

I've entered this viz in the Visualizing Online Takedown Contest at Visualizing.org.  You should check out the submissions, there's some truly inspiring work there.

As you can imagine, this was a large chunk of data (600k+ rows) for Tableau Public, which restricts rows to 100k.  Being used to using massive amounts of data in Tableau Professional, I of course forgot about this restriction until I went to publish it to the web on the morning of the contest submission.

In order to publish it I had to aggregate the data to month from day/minute.  Unfortunately, I had presented the data at the week level, which is not an option for extract aggregation, so I also had to change some of -the views.  Note to self:  add this to the Ideas on Tableau Community.

Tableau Civic Data Contest

CLICK ME!  CLICK ME!

Tableau is holding another data viz contest.    There's some amazing visualizations posted from around the world.  Check them out and vote for your favorite via twitter.

Civic Data Contest Entries

Educating Girls

CLICK ME!  CLICK ME!

I learned about the impact that ensuring girl education could have on the world when I was in school in 1997. I was blown away. Why didn't anyone tell me this before? Why aren't we making this a priority? Why hasn't anyone told the Miss America contestants? (because this is the answer to ending world hunger - wink)

Well, apparently a lot of very smart people did know about this and were doing great things to improve girls participation in school in poorer countries.  It was just me who didn't know.  But here we are a decade later and I suspect that there's still a lot of people who don't understand the power of this concept.  The Girl Effect has an excellent video explaining it here and 10x10 has produced the movie Girl Rising:

Girl Rising is a groundbreaking film, directed by Academy Award nominee Richard Robbins, which tells the stories of 9 extraordinary girls from 9 countries, written by 9 celebrated writers and narrated by 9 renowned actresses. 

Basically, making sure a girl goes to school means that she is more likely to get married later (in adulthood), access contraception, have fewer children, help to keep her family out of poverty through employment, and ensure that all her children are educated.  We're finally beginning to see some uptake on the issue and the results are bearing out in parts of the world, but there's still a long way to go.

I made this viz iPad size. I figured if I built it.... the iPad would come.  I sure wish I had one to test it out.  If anyone out there could let me know how it behaves, I'd love the feedback.

Cheers!

CLICK THE IMAGE TO VIEW THE VIZ.

Viz Policing a Rachel Maddow Chart

Rachel Maddow's show is one of the few things I enjoy watching on television.  Tonight, while she was interviewing Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, I became seriously distracted by this chart.  I kept looking at it expecting it to be telling me more than it did.

As I continued to watch the interview, my mind kept obsessing over that dang chart.  I wonder, is it necessary for this medium to bad chart - does television require a certain amount of chart bling in order to keep their audience?  Or is it that the graphics have to match the set or the celebrity brand?  Do these shows follow certain branding rules for all graphics?

So I re-charted.  It only took 10 minutes and it didn't interfere with the rest of my life, so no, I do not have a vizing addiction.

What. No Funny Babies?! How parents' describe their children...

What we say about our children says a lot about us.  I came across this great article in Slate,  No Big Deal, but This Researcher’s Theory Explains Everything About How Americans Parent which discusses new research in parental ethnotheories by Harkness and Super at the University of Connecticut among six Western societies.  How we describe our children reflects our parenting styles and cultural values.

Every society has what it intuitively believes to be the right way to raise a child, what Harkness calls parental ethnotheories. (It is your mother-in-law, enlarged to the size of a country.) These are the choices we make without realizing that we’re making choices.

In other words, your most personal observations of your child are actually cultural constructions. In a study conducted by Harkness and her international colleagues, American parents talked about their children as intelligent and even as “cognitively advanced.” (Also: rebellious.) Italian parents, though, very rarely praised their children for being intelligent. Instead, they were even-tempered and “simpatico.” So although both the Americans and the Italians noted that their children asked lots of questions, they meant very different things by it: For the Americans, it was a sign of intelligence; for the Italians, it was a sign of socio-emotional competence. The observation was the same; the interpretation was radically different.

Tableau Finishing Touches: Data Date Range

As with everything we build, it's the finishing touches that seem to make a big difference.  How many times have you produced a brilliant report only to have someone point out that one little miss (not mistake) that has nothing to do with the analysis and yet that's what everyone is focusing on?  Well, these things matter because they tend to distract your audience.

The best defence against these misses is to have a kind editor review for you.  These friends are invaluable, but there often isn't time.  So, I've decided to do a series of posts that cover all the little bits of simple finishing touches that I've learned to do the hard way (by having them pointed out to me in meetings) or through the guidance of Tableau guru blog posts like this one Hey! Your Tableau Public Viz is Ugly and Confusing.

Tableau 8 Viz Makeover

Tableau is holding another viz contest, the Elite 8 Viz Makeover Contest.  Entries are only accepted for US and UK residents, but I thought this Bird Strike viz data was so interesting, I decided to make it over in 8 anyway.  The new features in 8 allow you to create more of an infographic style viz, which gets my creative juices going.  So while I know, this is not a strictly professional style for a scatter plot, I don't care.  I like it.  And I hope you do too.  It's too large for this spot, so please view here.

Crowdcharting in Tableau

I confess.  I hate stacked bar charts almost as much as I hate pie charts. Too often I find them used with too many categories to be informative and unless the data distributes nicely, there's always one or two categories that nearly get squeezed out of existence. Moreover, unless they are labelled with values, I have trouble judging their difference from one another. Just like I have trouble judging and comparing pie wedges.

I recently came across this post on the Economist blog where they present the same issue in 3 different charts. How to present a comparison of multi-categories with multiple measures.

" WHAT is the best way to display information? The data geeks at The Economist struggle with this question every day. On January 17th we produced a daily chart about Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding site. It showed projects by three measures—money pledged, average pledge and success rate—using traditional bar charts... How could we have adapted the technique to the data a bit better? "

US Gun Deaths in Contrast

Since the Sandy Hook shooting tragedy, the gun issue in the US is being seriously (and sometimes irrationally) debated while the families and community struggle with their loss and grief.  Being from a country with gun regulations, it is hard to watch and read some of the extreme misinformation being spouted.

I don't think there's a country on the planet that doesn't have some gun deaths each year, but there are plenty who have put in place measures aimed to reduce the volumes. The countries below represent nations similar to US culture, many of whom have enacted some form of regulation as a result of a similar tragedy.