Posts with tag Data Visualization

I was talking on Bluesky¹ about why I dislike the widespread use of alphabetical ordering for states on the y-axis of charts. There are better ways! My favorite is detailed in this notebook, where I talk through some methods for treating paths. I have an interactive tool for building out paths like this one, which is a decent way to order all the countries in the world for data visualization.

I’ve been doing a lot of my data exploration lately on Observable Notebooks, which is–sort of–a Javascript version of Jupyter notebooks that automatically runs all the code inline. Married with Vega-Lite or D3, it provides a way to make data exploration editable and shareable in a way that R and python data code simply can’t be; and since it’s all HTML, you can do more interesting things.

As I often do, I’m going to pull away from various forms of Internet reading/engagement through Lent. This year, this brings to mind one of my favorite stray observations about digital libraries that I’ve never posted anywhere.

As part of the Creating Data project, I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with interactive scatterplots. The most interesting of them is this one about the full Hathi collection. But I’ve posted a few more I want to link to from here:

I have a new article on dimensionality reduction on massive digital libraries this month. Because it’s a technique with applications beyond the specific tasks outlined there, I want to link to a few things here.

Here’s a very technical, but kind of fun, problem: what’s the optimal order for a list of geographical elements, like the states of the USA?