Data graphics is hard. I almost bought myself a book (by a blog friend) about it to read over the break before I remembered that I would never do that.
Never read over break, that is. I will probably read it eventually, but only when somebody pays me to do something that would require getting better at graphics.
Very interesting visualization: https://www.bbc.com/news/resources/idt-7464500a-6368-4029-aa41-ab94e0ee09fb
Well done, includes both time (by making the graphic animated) and the relationship between cases and deaths. There's so much information it's tricky to quickly compare countries (and I wish they had an option to scale to population), but still a good attempt at a new way of presenting the information.
That was interesting, but not what I want in a graphic. I want to be able to see the key points at a glance before looking more closely.
Yes, I think it's more of good attempt than a complete success (or, to put it another way, it's most helpful if you are already familiar with the basic information that Heebie describes, and looking for a different visual to put the data in a different context. If that was the first information you encountered about the pandemic it would be very difficult to understand the broad overview).
That page links to the BBC COVID tracker, which is their version of the various overview charts: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51235105
5: I think it's a good overview for somebody looking back to see what happened, which may be useful for somebody five years from now. We aren't to the point where we should be looking back yet and a basic plot of whatever vs time at least lets you look ahead somewhat.
1 and 2: I took a class with Kathy Rowell of Health Data Viz.
They have a good website, and you can find her blog posts there. Her personal website is really good. She's smart and funny. The blog posts are easily digested.
Thanks. That looks more business-y than I'm used to (Tableau instead of SAS, etc.).
9: I still suck at it, because I suck at visual stuff. I didn't take the tableau class. I'm too low on the totem pole to be worthy of the cost of a license. Her blog is mostly about design principles. In the class I took, she said that all good ideas can be expressed on paper. The software is secondary. Also, she dislikes b7 bubble charts from anyone but the most expert.
https://ksrowell.com/a-profoundly-moving-data-display/
I don't want to spam for a company, so I'll stop after this, but In the post above I really liked how she talked about the Vietnam Memorial as Data Visualization and the significance of the choice to order the names by date of death or date reported missing.
I've done some (small fry) data visualisation stuff for work projects, and have read a bunch of books on the subject. Both conceptual/design centred (Alberto Cairo, for example), and more practical books on D3, Sigma, and the like. It's something I'd love to do more of, but i) I'm not a javascript dev, ii) no time. So I hack things together using Bokeh and it mostly works. I think it's hard to do it really well (and I have no confidence whatsoever that I'm someone who could do it well).
The UK government sites are actually quite good:
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=ltla&areaName=Ealing
The heat map on that site shows the surge in high school and university age people in the autumn, and the first wave hitting older people back in the spring. Also, the newer variant here supposedly hitting younger people more than before, hence the change in the distribution of the heat map.
12: Heat maps in geographic maps are one of the coolest hinges ever.
I'm glad we at least mostly moved away from the initially ubiquitous "logarithm of cumulative total cases" to the current "rolling average of new cases, population-adjusted". The latter tells you a lot more what happened in the past versus what's happening now.
Cumulative representations made at least a little more sense in the beginning when people were trying to assess "is this getting out of control" as a binary question, but of course it did in the US and Europe, so now cumulative makes it hard to disaggregate history from present trends.
Maybe having learned lessons from covid, science will have really great graphics for the super gonorrhea outbreak.
1: I'm in the acknowledgments of that book.
Because you taught him how to use R.
Did it have to do with heat maps? and topography?
I'm guessing more of the former than the latter, but I have not read it.
The Amazon preview is very informative if you want to see what's in it.
OT Bleg: paging Witt.
I just found out that Tim's company will match donations 1:1. I've been trying to figure out what food and housing organizations could use and quickly spend money locally. Anyone know a good way to figure this out quickly?
Figures with cases per day by US region have been pretty common
They always put us in the region with the fancy people in New York, but really we're just a piece of Ohio saved by Philadelphia voters.
My sister just got her first covid jab. Hopefully, mom gets one this week. I'm at the end of the line, but that's fine.
Hooray! My dad also got jabbed this week, which made me cry.
I don't know when the institutional old people in my family will get a jab.
Everybody here looks at Drum's daily charts, right? I haven't found a one-stop data visualization that I like better.
27: He got it for working at a hospital, although he's only been going in ~1/week. I think he's been trying to avoid seeing patients, too. My mom has to wait for the general over 75 group.
No, Drum finally lost me with his trolling.
I just found out my mom got her first shoot today, so that's good.