Comments on: Not Just Another Pretty Picture

By: Hilary Davis

Hilary Davis — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:23:13 +0000

Hi Tom – thanks for your feedback – I hope you read beyond the first few sentences of the article. In my lead-in to this article (“Trying to decide between a stacked column bar chart and a 3-D area chart is par for the course in my work. Microsoft Excel© is great for many practical needs, but it doesn’t always support the need to create simple, compelling and interactive graphical data visualizations that are critical for libraries to best express value, communicate trends, and test assumptions about library services and collections.”), I was using that example as a way to describe how ineffectual my strategies as limited to Excel and other standard visualization tools has been. The main points of the article were (1) that there are better, more effective ways to make your point with data as folks like Tukey, Tufte and others have elaborated on much more fully, and (2) to try out other tools beyond Excel, and (3) to highlight some fun examples from libraryland and beyond that use good visualization strategies.

By: Tom in Raleigh

Tom in Raleigh — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:59:32 +0000

Great site! But I hope you’re kidding about the choosing to use a 3D area chart. 3D display of 2D data is a cute trick by MBAs, but serious data display does not use this sort of fakery, as Ed Tufte often points out.

By: Courtney Lewis

Courtney Lewis — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:17:05 +0000

I think this post has such relevance for not only librarians presenting their programs but also for the way we teach students about creating data images and presenting them for maximum effect. Thank you for collating all these terrific sources!

By: Ellie

Ellie — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:45:06 +0000

Thanks Hilary! My library will be doing a big student library and technology use survey in the Spring, so this is very timely for me.