A New Blog Series on Visualization

There is a new blog series on visualization techniques -- mostly using R -- starting up.  I recommend checking this out.  When appropriate I may comment or supplement with applications to public management research.

I was hooked with the list of simple advice.  But, there is a lot more here to read and consider.


From the post (link follows):

 If you are too busy to read this post in full, follow this short list of guidelines and you’ll be on your way to producing elegant visualizations that impose a minimal cognitive burden on your audience:

1. Never represent something in 2 or (god forbid) 3 dimensions if it can be represented in one—NEVER use pie charts, 3-D pie charts, stacked bar charts, or 3-D bar charts.
2. Remove as much chart junk as possible–unnecessary gridlines, shading, borders, etc.
3. Give your audience a sense of the noise present in your data–draw error bars or confidence bands if you are plotting estimates.
4. If you want to plot multiple types of groups on a single outcome (the visual analog of cross-tabulations/marginals), use multi-paneled plots. These can also help ifoverploting looks too cluttered.
5. Avoid mosaic plots. Instead use paneled histograms.
6. Ditch the legend if you can (you almost always can).

http://solomonmessing.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/visualization-series-insight-from-cleveland-and-tufte-on-plotting-numeric-data-by-groups/