Monday Data Viz - Moving Beyond Bars with Beeswarms
For those of you following US news at home, the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failure the other week has kept news organizations busy and investors worried. The ...
Posts by Category
data viz
Monday Data Viz - Icons + Data Viz
Over the last couple of months, I have been inundated with all sorts of packaging after the arrival of our little guy and the one below caught my eye.
Monday Data Viz - Small Multiples and Group Context
I, like the next data visualizer, love small multiples graphs. And I was happy to see Yan Holtz (of From Data To Viz) added a great small multiples plot to h...
Monday Data Viz - Helper Annotation
I came across a not-so-straight forward visualization the other day and it made me think of a piece from Andy’s Kirk’s “the little of visualization design” s...
Monday Data Viz - Simple Yet Elegant
I wanted to share a graphic I lifted from Philip Bump’s newsletter. In it, he shows a simple yet elegant plot from Jay Cuda, which depicts baseball stadium e...
Monday Data Viz - What’s your type-face?
With State Department’s move away from Times New Roman to Calibri, I thought it would be a good time to talk about typefaces. The rationale Secretary Blinkin...
Monday Data Viz - Tracking Patient Health Stories
This is my first email of the 2023 and I wanted to start off with something a bit inspirational. After reading through my Nightingale magazine last month (th...
Monday Data Viz - Coverage Remake
I wanted to share a graph makeover from our very own Tim Essam from a few weeks back. The country team he supports had a visual in their prep POART slide dec...
Monday Data Viz - The Time Axis
When we go to plot a trend graph, without even thinking, we use the x-axis for periods. This is a pretty typical thing we see when reading other trend plots,...
Monday Data Viz - Timelines and Icons
More World Cup content from me this week. There have been lots of great games in the group stage to watch since the World Cup began last Sunday. I was review...
Monday Data Viz - Grouping Categories
The World Cup kicked off this weekend and the US plays their first match this afternoon against Wales. Unsurprisingly, I came across a World Cup graphic over...
Monday Data Viz - Part to Whole
I came across this Tableau Viz of the Day by Megan Menth in September and have been thinking about one particular element of it since then. This visual break...
Monday Data Viz - DST misalignment
Hopefully everyone remembered to turn their clocks back yesterday (though, this is getting harder and harder not to do when most of our clocks are tied to ou...
Monday Data Viz - Applying the Style Guide to Our Work
Last week, I was asked to update a visual showing the number of patients currently on treatment for two partners. This visual had been provided to SGAC at Q2...
Monday Data Viz - Viz Eliciting Emotions
A former colleague of ours flagged a great series of visuals from The Upshot last week that I wanted to share with you all. In their article, Aatish Bhatia, ...
Monday Data Viz - Annotations Abound
Last month, the New York Times had an article on the decline in childhood poverty. What stood out to me was a graphic from Alica Parlapiano, which had such g...
Monday Data Viz - Squares over Circles
When we think of a scatter plot, we think of marks spanning across a x and y axis. And if the user could add a third encoding through size, changing the rela...
Monday Data Viz - The Urban Exodus
I’m teleworking today and writing this from home, which is pretty typical of about a third of American workers since about mid 2021 (down from its peak of an...
Monday Data Viz - The importance of context
This week I wanted to share a map that had been making the rounds on social media a month or so again. The map comes to us from ProPublica and was actually p...
Monday Data Viz - Excel FTW
I saw a great post on Twitter last week; great because it validated my world view. Koen Van den Eeckhout (called out earlier this summer for his excellence b...
Monday Data Viz - What are we looking at?
Last month while I was traveling, I noticed some visualizating being used on the flight status tracker. Let’s take a look at what’s going on.
Monday Data Viz - Connecting with Your Data, Part II
I wanted to follow up on Rohan Jhunja’s amazing Thali chart project that I shared last week, but sharing a project of my own. In March, my wife and I adopted...
Monday Data Viz - Connecting with Your Data, Part I
While there were a lot of great articles in the debut issue of The Nightingale, I wanted to share one that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Rohan Jhunja wrote...
Monday Data Viz - Size and Scope
With everything else in the news recently, the conflict in Ukraine has been receiving less of our attention these days, but is important nonetheless. I wante...
Monday Data Viz - Dual Axis Manipulation
I’ve long rebuked the use of dual axes plots and last week, I saw yet another great example of why multi-axes can be so dangerous. The example comes to use f...
Monday Data Viz - Directional Dumbbell Plots
After going to my fourth Nats’ game over the weekend, I finally attended my first win of the 2022 season (I’m not superstitious, but I did get a new hat and ...
Monday Data Viz - Sub Par Sports Apps Data Viz
The other weekend, Jessica R and I lucked out with some great weather when we ran the Broad Street 10 miler, the largest 10 mile race in the country. The rac...
Monday Data Viz - Slope chart + small multiples
As PEPFAR, we’ve been collecting quarterly MER data that runs back to FY15, so trend data is a staple for our work. Armed with ample data, our first stop whe...
Monday Data Viz - Aggregating Away the Signal
Last month, Zan Armstrong wrote an amazing article on Stack Overflow’s blog, The Overflow, where she discussed the problem that we grapple with every single ...
Monday Data Viz - Out of Scale
Working with PEPFAR data is made easier by the fact that there are standard indicators with clear definitions that are collected across over 50 countries thr...
Monday Data Viz - Action Oriented Data Viz
I saw a blog post last week that filled my thoughts the rest of the week and wanted to share with you all. In the post, Albert Rapp draws on a Storytelling W...
Monday Data Viz - Filling the Gap
Last week, Axios put out a COVID visual by Will Chase that I thought was really impressive. The visual shows the difference between excess deaths (per 100,00...
Monday Data Viz - Re-plotting the difference
It’s been a little while since Andy Kirk updated his “Little of Visualization Design” series”, but he added a new post last week, which sparked some joy in m...
Monday Data Viz - Annotate Like a Designer
During the Data Visualization Conference last month, I caught a session with Alli Torban and really liked what she had to say and her work. My synapses start...
Monday Data Viz - Mapping the war in Ukrainian
I know many of us have had our eyes glued to the news and social media these last few days tracking the events unfolding in Ukraine. The reporting on everyda...
Monday Data Viz - Iterate, Part III
Sorry to keep harping on this topic, but I really have to do one last write up on iteration and then I’ll leave this topic alone for at least a little while....
Monday Data Viz - Stealing Design Cheats
Data viz is it’s own particular arena, but there is lots to borrow for the design world (I’ve touched on this before). I came across this older post by Adam ...
Monday Data Viz - Data Viz Tools
As analysts, we spend a lot of our time digging into the numbers to analyze, visualize, and communicate data. In order to do these things, we rely on particu...
Monday Data Viz - Iterate, Part II
The other week I discussed the importance of iteration and my process from getting from start to finish. Apropos of this, Dylan Moriarty of the Washington Po...
Monday Data Viz - Iterate
I hope everyone is having a good New Year so far and back in the saddle to take on 2022. This week I wanted to kick things off with a reminder that creating ...
Monday Data Viz - Books to Propel Your Work Forward in 2022
It’s hard to imagine that we’re only a couple weeks off from the end of the year. Despite the confines of working from home, it’s been another busy year with...
Monday Data Viz - Bird is the Word
I’ve been playing quite a bit of Wingspan, the board game, so when I saw Andrew Van Dam and Alyssa Fowers’ article in the Post last Sunday, I was super excit...
Monday Data Viz - Bump Charts
The Washington Post released a story on the rise of African cities two Fridays ago (printed as a special section last Thursday) by Max Bearak and graphics by...
Monday Data Viz - Multiple Facets of Different Sizes
In keeping with the recent theme of reviewing the visual hierarchy, I came across another great example from the New York Times. The NYT’s landing page for C...
Monday Data Viz - Color Contrast Tool
A couple weeks back, I brought up the need to check contrast when using grey elements in a graph. As we decrease the saturation and brightness of a color to ...
Monday Data Viz - Visual Hierachy, Part II
Last week, I talked a bit about leveraging the visual hierarchy and gave an example from Schwabish’s 2014 journal article. Today, I wanted to showcase this e...
Monday Data Viz - Visual Hierachy, Part I
Data visualization is more than plotting points on a page; it’s a powerful lever to synthesize tens or millions of distinct data points into a digestible pro...
Monday Data Viz - One topic per slide
When presenting data, I’ve learned that it’s best to keep it simple; each slide should convey one point to the audience. Doing this leads to crafting a deck ...
Monday Data Viz - Gray…it’s not just for breakfast anymore
In data visualization, gray can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. The use of gray can allow you to minimize chart junk while also adding mor...
Monday Data Viz - Offset bars
Germans were at the polls to decide something big, their next government. For the first time in 16 years, Angela Merkel was not on the ballot, basically sin...
Monday Data Viz - Hiking Inspiration
Inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes. Last week, I was really drawn to one of Tableau’s Data Viz of the Day - Mountain Hikes, by Agata Kettrick.
Monday Data Viz - Remake - What’s worth knowing in economics?
Last week I came across an article that had some pretty interesting findings, but had a pretty poor graphic to explain their findings. The article was writte...
Monday Data Viz - Stop the stoplights
The MER Q3 data was just released Friday, which means it’s time yet again to look at target achievement. Since as long as I’ve been around working in the PEP...
Monday Data Viz - Conveying Concepts with Visuals
A picture is worth a thousand words and when we try to explain complex topics, a visual or image is often the best way to more easily convey what is going on...
Monday Data Viz - Olympic Inspiration
This year’s Olympics in Tokyo is feeling a bit different with the empty stadiums due to COVID. That said, it’s still bringing me much joy to watch any sport ...
Monday Data Viz - Spilt Martini
When thinking about Tableau, two topics come directly to my mind: dashboards and interactive exploratory analysis. Tableau is such a powerful tool to dig int...
Monday Data Viz - Highlighting Outliers
For most of our data related work in PEPFAR, we look for patterns through analyzing trends over time and results against targets, almost exclusively in the a...
Monday Data Viz - The Full Data Viz Lifecycle
I wanted to share an interesting read from a couple weeks back. In his post, Elijah Meeks shares his thoughts on the data viz life cycle from end to end. Mee...
Monday Data Viz - Focusing on the “aha” and not the “ooh ahh”
In advance of his new book release, Steve Wexler was on a recent episode of the Storytelling with Data podcast. For starters, I thought it was interesting th...
Monday Data Viz - A Riff on Tile Grid Maps
A few weeks ago, the New York Times had an interesting op-ed by Dr. Sema K. Sgaier about the US’s vaccine strategy. In her article, Sgaier talks about the us...
Monday Data Viz - Whiteboards and Markers
Our SI jobs are very heavily rooted in data analysis and data viz, spending most of our time digging through our PEPFAR data to support country and technical...
Monday Data Viz - Inline Legends
The other week, I was reviewing some old visualizations and was reminded of one I spent quite a bit of time reviewing at the time. The below plot comes to us...
Monday Data Viz - Heads Up!
I imagine some of you had your heads up all weekend, hoping the falling space debris (and what a fabulous headline from the NYTs!) was not hurdling down to e...
Monday Data Viz - Big Impact from Small Multiples
I know we’re all overwhelmed with how omnipresent COVID is in all of our lives these days, but I did want to share a good viz I saw on the Post last week. In...
Monday Data Viz - Borrowing from Graphic Design
Working with data all the, when it comes to design we think primarily about data viz principles. But there is a lot we can learn from the broader graphic des...
Monday Data Viz - Brood X
We are just a short wait from something I have been counting down for a while now…17 years to be exact. In the next couple of months, cicadas will descend up...
Monday Data Viz - 30DayChartChallenge
Data viz isn’t something learned in a vacuum or isn’t picked up by purely reading a book about it; it takes a lot of practice and learning from others as wel...
Monday Data Viz - Elements of a Good Visualization
This morning, I wanted to share an old work that I am constantly reminded of. The Venn Diagram below comes to us from David McCandless of Information is Beau...
Monday Data Viz - Encoding Target Achievement
In the PEPFAR space, we spend a lot of time visualizing achievement to monitor how successfully our countries/districts/partners are at getting to their fisc...
Monday Data Viz - Avoiding Stacked Charts
To tie into his book release, Jon Schwabish has had a host of data viz stars share their takes on different chart types. The videos are short, the content is...
Monday Data Viz - Annotate, Annotate, Annotate
As I got started with data viz, I thought the secret to going from a standard graphic to a stellar one was all software based; what cutting edge software is ...
Monday Data Viz - Plot Function
Last week, many of us were busy with the release of Q1 data, updating Tableau workbooks and/or creating visuals to support the country and technical teams fo...
Monday Data Viz - Plot Function
For these posts, I usually share some interesting, novel, or important content that I’ve come across around data visualization principles and techniques. Ins...
Monday Data Viz - Mark It Up
I came across a post from a year ago on Alli Torban’s blog, Data Viz Today, which had an interesting idea. In her post she says,
Monday Data Viz - Encoding Data
I saw a great graphic from the Washington Post (reposted on Twitter this week but actually from an article published three years ago) that I wanted to share.
Monday Data Viz - Be wary of chloropleth maps
To kick off the year, I wanted to share a nifty gif on twitter the other week. This gif is a take on the “land doesn’t vote, people do” visual from 2019 depi...
corps
Creating a reproducible example (reprex)
coRps Session on creating a reproducible example (reprex)
RBBS - 10 Functions/Iteration Part II
Part 10 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitH...
RBBS - 10 Functions/Iteration Part I
Part 10 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitH...
RBBS - 6 Importing Data
Part 6 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
RBBS - 2 Visualizations, Part II
Part 2 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
RBBS - 2 Visualizations, Part I
Part 2 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
RBBS - 1 Motivation
Part 1 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
RBBS - 0 Software and Account Setup
Part 0 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
Dynamic Scripting Workflow
coRps Session on Dynamic Scripting Workflow
Google API Workflow
coRps Session on Google API Workflow
Working with Messy Spreadsheets
coRps Session on Messy Spreadsheets
rbbs
RBBS - 10 Functions/Iteration Part II
Part 10 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitH...
RBBS - 10 Functions/Iteration Part I
Part 10 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitH...
RBBS - 6 Importing Data
Part 6 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
RBBS - 2 Visualizations, Part II
Part 2 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
RBBS - 2 Visualizations, Part I
Part 2 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
RBBS - 1 Motivation
Part 1 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
RBBS - 0 Software and Account Setup
Part 0 of the coRps R Building Blocks Series (RBBS). All content can be found on this blog under the rbbs category as well as on the USAID-OHA-SI/coRps GitHu...
presentations
Simple Machines - Improving Workflows with APIs
Presentation at Posit Conf 2024 in Seattle, Washington
USAID Global Data Skills Workshop
Overview From August 28-September 1, 2023, our division put on the USAID Global Data Skills Workshop in Bangkok, Thailand. For two and a half days, participa...
Visualizing Data
This presentation was given the first week of August 2022 as part of the OHA/SIEI Analytics Building Blocks Summer Series .
Digging a Pit of Success for Your Organization
Presentation at RStudio Conf 2022 in National Harbor
The Joy of Visualization
This presentation provides an introduction to the OHA Data Visualization Style Guide.
manual
Installing Source Sans Pro Typeface
Source Sans Pro Typeface