Felton Annual Report — A Eulogy

I received the last Annual Report by Nicholas Felton. It is his 10th report in a series that began with a thin volume in 2005. I hesitate to say that I’ve “finally” received the report because I was not anticipating the conclusion of the series in any way. Instead, I had always looked forward to these […]

Tools are not to blame, blame laziness

PowerPoint and Excel aren’t the enemy, though a lot of people to seem to think they are. Frequently, I hear others say “don’t use PowerPoint” or snicker when someone mentions conducting analysis with Excel. This is wrong. There is nothing wrong with Excel or PowerPoint; I am a fan and user of both programs. The problem […]

Feedback on FCC Net Neutrality

Over at Data Nouveau, a highlight of the Sunlight Foundation’s recent analysis and visualization of feedback on over 800,000 comments on the proposed net neutrality rules.

Now Interactive: Transitions into the Workforce

How does a community college major relate to the eventual industry of employment? Now you can interact and explore the relationship between Iowa community college students and their eventual employment sector or your computer or mobile device. This is an update to a static poster I developed a couple of years ago. There is good […]

Data Nouveau: Ideas for Visualizations

Starting a project where you need to make a series of graphs or a visualization can be frustrating. One of the hardest tasks is to find a theme, a style which you want to use. Though minimalism is the dominate “style” in data visualization, there is a lot of approaches to any graphical approaches. So I’ve […]

Visualizing Tuition & Fees

The Chronicle of Higher Education has put together an interactive chart showing tuition and fees at Iowa community colleges. Play through the timeline and you can see tuition and fees becoming a larger share of revenue for the 15 colleges, while state funding declined. There are a couple of notes along the way to highlight […]

Oh the Humanities

The New York Times has an article on the hardships of a humanities Ph.D. Among the highlights: it takes an average of 9 years to finish a humanities Ph.D. (if you do); high amount of debt (over $25,000); and the old age of graduates (35 years-old) which means less time available to recover all of […]

Taxonomy of Data Visualization

This post is a part of a collection for an upcoming course on Data Visualization at the 2010 Mid-America Association for Institutional Research annual meeting. These posts will be collected and placed on the course website. They may also be modified as the course develops to increase clarity. An Economist article quotes Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, […]

Preview: Community College Finances – Tufte Scatterplot

I’ve actually shown this graph before at a State Board of Education meeting last year. I don’t think it was received as well as I had hoped. Many people were worried about the “complexity” of the diagram and I did hear some murmuring when I flipped to the slide. Below is the image of the […]