#AskAndy Anything about Data: Further Reading

Did you catch the Ask Andy Anything About Data webinar? I talked with Andy Kirk (of visualisingdata.com) about the state of data visualization, appropriate chart choices, and the etiquette of critiquing others. It was great fun and we managed to tackle ten questions in the hour. We discussed a lot of different resources which are gathered here.
Did you catch the Ask Andy Anything About Data webinar? I talked with Andy Kirk (of visualisingdata.com) about the state of data visualization, appropriate chart choices, and the etiquette of critiquing others.

It was great fun and we managed to tackle 10 questions in the hour. We discussed a lot of different resources which are gathered here. (This post isn't a write-up of all the answers. For those, I recommend you watch the webinar.)

We talked about Anscombe's Quartet and the sparklines in Kayak:

I discussed Fitbit dashboards and some climate-change charts:

  • Fitbit - Dashboards that Make a Difference
  • BBC - Six Graphics that Explain Climate Change
  • VisualisingData - Nice Story about the Impact of a Visualisation

This was a great question to answer. Here's a link to the original post by Stephen Few, and responses by myself and Ben Jones:

More fun! We decided to do a five-a-side squad-picking thing, evoking memories of school days when we were always picked last. We used Show Me's starting points as our list. Andy K. picked line charts first. I picked bar, then he picked treemap, and so on. We both felt Sankey charts would be our ringers!

This was a very specific question but brought up some interesting points of discussion, and a chance to talk about Charles Minard:

We answered a question, not from Twitter, from Helen Lindsay: What should I do if my client wants a radar chart and I’m struggling to resist?

Here are the good and the bad of radar charts:

Although this was directed at a different Andy, we hijacked it because it's a great question. What books are good for data visualization? Here's some great starting points:

This is a fantastic question. The posts below should be mandatory for all people getting into this field:

That covered everything! I hope you enjoyed the webinar. We were deliberately trying something new. If we do it again, which guests would you like us to have?

If you missed the webinar, you can watch it here.