Have a great Friday and weekend, everybody!
If you're not familiar with the reference, read up here.
One thing you have to do when making graphs is to be sure that your graph actually makes things easier for your reader. If it is too convoluted or “scary” looking, it turns your reader off and makes them wish you just gave them a list of written facts or a column of numbers instead.
I have a tale about a messy graph. It is fresh on my mind.
It’s been many, many years since I’ve cared about the NBA Finals. But one of the two teams is from my home town of Oklahoma City. In the past few years, the city in which I grew up went from having no basketball team, to having a mediocre basketball team, to having a great basketball team. It makes me vicariously proud, like the first time I saw my daughter write her name legibly or dunk her first basketball on an NBA regulation goal*.
Six years ago today I started my employment at StatSoft. It was a different era – George W. Bush was in the White House. We’d never had a female Speaker of the House. Regular unleaded gas averaged $2.95 a gallon and X-Men: The Last Stand was hitting theaters.
What else has changed?
NPR has a pretty neat data visualization on their blog. The post concerns American women and the job sectors in which they work.
I’m referring specifically to the set of pie charts in the middle of the post. Two time periods. Two sexes. Thirteen job sectors. So much information conveyed in so little space.