Ever get a letter from your alma mater asking what you’ve been up to since you graduated? That data is used to see how well the college has been doing. It’s especially important for public colleges to see if most graduates stick around. Ever send one back? No? Well, most don’t. But that’s a pain […]
Data Visualization
Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce Presentation
This presentation was given at the MidAIR 2009 conference in Kansas City. An earlier post highlighted a poster associated with this project. This presentation highlights the methodology and reasoning behind the methodology. I’ve posted scripts and other materials to the project’s webpage.
In Depth: What We Said
Each year the Iowa Department of Education publishes The Annual Condition of Iowa’s Community Colleges. In 2008 I was a part of a major redesign which included adding meaningful narrative and emphasis on graphical representation of data. As we prepare the 2009 edition we are evaluating last years report. We had a few goals for […]
Why have two dimensions when one is half the price
Data visualization is great because it can merges statistics–a largely positive science–with explanation. Thus, unacquainted individuals fully into a conversation without relying on complex structures. However, I think many writers on data visualization underestimate how easy it is to forget the positive statements from statistics and turns into rhetorical statistics without a good theoretical basis.
Preview: Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce
Today the Iowa Department of Education and Iowa Workforce Development released “Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce” poster. In short, DE and IWD partnered to follow students from Iowa community colleges into the workforce. The poster shows how specific majors lead to employment in various sectors in Iowa’s economy. The findings are discussed in the full […]
Preview: Visualizing Transitions to the Workforce
The Iowa Department of Education and Iowa Workforce Development have teamed together to track students from community college into the workforce. While we’ve looked at returns to degree and in-state retention rate, we wanted to see where kids were working. In short, we looked at majors and tracked them into the industry. We aggregated majors […]
Baseball Stats
ESPN’s interesting article on pitch count also contained some ugly graphs. The articles thesis is on starting pitchers now regularly pitching fewer than 100 pitches. Exhibit 1: Transparency and Area Charts Area plots don’t work well when they overlap. The above chart had to use transparency, which makes it difficult to associate colors with the […]
New York Times’ Take on Business Cycles
The New York Times built an interactive graphic on business cycles since the the early 1970s. Instead of displaying a business cycle as something that looks like a sine wave, NYT uses a Cartesian plane with each quandrant representing either expansion, slowdown, downturn, and recovery. They use industrial production as a proxy for the business […]