

My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization - nkurz
http://vincebuffalo.org/2012/11/08/learn-visualization.html

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nicpottier
Jesus, is that visualization supposed to help? I stared at it for minutes and
I still don't really grok it. Seems like it is trying to channel a similar
method as the Napolean March:
[http://bryanrulli.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/tufte_napolean...](http://bryanrulli.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/tufte_napolean_march.jpg)

But failing completely at it.

In any case, is this a common type of visualization now? Maybe with some
experience it becomes easy to grok what is happening?

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radicalbyte
No, it's not common to see this kind of visualisation. Bad visualisations?
Yeah, they're pretty common. The usual mistake is overuse of Pie Charts.

I'd recommend the OP (and anyone else who has an interest in communication) to
read:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-
Visual-Display-Quantitative-Info...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Visual-
Display-Quantitative-Information/dp/0961392142)

Information Dashboard Design [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Dashboard-
Design-Effecti...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Dashboard-Design-
Effective-Communication/dp/0596100167)

Now You See [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-You-See-Stephen-
Few/dp/097060198...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-You-See-Stephen-
Few/dp/0970601980)

~~~
tgb
Ironically, the OP recommends that you read The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information, as well. I suspect that the mediocre example (I thought it was
reasonably readable and somewhat interesting) was there more as a
demonstration of the fact that R makes non-scatter plots easily, too.

~~~
mrdub
It's from <http://www.jasondavies.com/parallel-sets/> and is one of the
example plots for <http://d3js.org/>

~~~
weaksauce
I must say that the icicle plot of the same data is way more readable. The
crisscrossing lines are all but useless to get a feel of the data.

go to <http://www.jasondavies.com/parallel-sets/> and click on icicle plot to
see what is going on.

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neilbowers
That's a terrible visualization. It takes way too long to work out what "the
story" is.

~~~
sprobertson
It's really only useful when interactive -
<http://www.jasondavies.com/parallel-sets/> \- and it still takes a while to
figure out what's going on.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Clicking on a _Show icicle plot!_ checkbox down in the article converts this
visualization to something much more readable.

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nashequilibrium
I really thought hard for a minute if the author was joking, the visualization
is really terrible. I would rather look at the table than the visualization, i
found this pycon talk really nice explaining dataViz patterns:
<http://pyvideo.org/video/637/data-design-meaning>

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hythloday
This is true of really all programming disciplines. I've lost count of the
times that dumping a CSV for Excel or a dot file for graphviz. Visualisation
is just as much an essential part of my toolbox as a text editor or debugger.

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klochner
More generally - be aggressive with your data: probe it, sort it, graph it,
sanity check it, and never take it at face value.

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pardner
It looks to me like the tabular data is inconsistent with the visualization -
the tables showed 0 perished from first or second class or crew, the
visualization showed something entirely different.

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mertd
There is a mistake in the tables. Top two are copies of each other but they
are supposed to show different things.

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svramanan
The table for "Age = Child, Survived = No" is the same as the table for "Age =
Adult, Survived = No". Odd, to say the least. One wonders where this
interesting fact is shown in the visualization.

~~~
mertd
If that were true, that would mean first and second class completely survived.
But the visualization shows this is not the case.

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bigsteve122
learn visualization but not the underlying statistical common sense that
allows you to produce meaningful data. yah right... R will do everything for
you... no need to worry about the real work...

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zerostar07
Curious about what other libraries people use. Matplotlib? Matlab?

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hagy
I’d strongly recommend matplotlib. It has a matlab like procedural interface
that makes it very easy to pickup if you’re coming from matlab.

Additionally, it’s wonderful to be able to “dive under the hood” if you need
to create a special type of visualization: i.e. the internal model is easy to
understand and highly customizable. This has enabled me to create several
awesome plots that would have been very difficult, if not impossible to create
with any other plotting program or library.

~~~
marksbrown
I completely agree about the breadth of matplotlib, though the difficulty can
be looking for examples. I've often found the examples on the matplotlib
website to be horribly out of date compared to features added in recent
releases. Are the plots you've done available online / Any recommended blogs
for interesting examples of plotting?

