President-elect Donald Trump has tasked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with running the non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Commission here in the US. So far, Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy have boasted about how the Commission will make the government... The post Can the DOGE Commission Deliver? A Data-Driven Look at Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Government Reform Claims appeared first on PolicyViz ..read more

My synagogue recently adopted a new prayer book for the High Holidays, the period of the Jewish year dedicated to reflection, repentance, and renewal. What caught my eye in this new book were its footnotes translating certain prayers or describing... The post Seeing Beyond the Data: Lessons from Faith, Text, and Visual Representation appeared first on PolicyViz ..read more

Last week, the Urban Institute released an updated version of the Urban Institute Data Visualization Style Guide, including new details on Urban’s data visualization branding, best practices, and accessibility. This is a slightly revised post of the original that appeared... The post Introducing the Urban Institute Data Visualization Style Guide’s Open-Source Excel Add-In appeared first on PolicyViz ..read more

Maybe the most common data visualizations to show election results are maps. Maps, maps, maps. People love maps. The challenge with maps related to elections, however, is that they don’t always accurately present the results. In the simple and oft-repeated... The post Beyond the Map: How Marimekko Charts Offer a New Perspective on Election Results appeared first on PolicyViz ..read more

I am excited to announce the launch Friends of Flourish, a dedicated Slack workspace for the community of creators, collaborators, and Flourish enthusiasts! Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out, this space is designed to connect you with... The post Introducing “Friends of Flourish” – Join The New Slack Workspace! appeared first on PolicyViz ..read more

In 2015, I wrote a thorough take down of the (erroneous) claim that humans “can process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.” which turned out to be one of the most popular posts I’ve ever published on this site. That... The post Fact-Checking 60,000 Thoughts: The Mystery Behind a Misleading Statistic appeared first on PolicyViz ..read more

For the last couple of years, I’ve been meeting pretty regularly with Max Graze, Amy Cesal, and Alan Wilson to explore and better understand data visualization style guides. There’s a lot to learn here about best practices, templates, and organizational principles! We even created our own website where... The post DataViz Style Guide Blog Series appeared first on PolicyViz ..read more

An age-old data visualization debate reared its head again recently when The European Correspondent (EC) published a new graphic titled “Terrorism’s bloody toll,” which looked and felt strikingly similar to Simon Scar’s 2011 award-winning visualization “Iraq’s bloody toll.” This situation raises an... The post A Tale of Data Visualization: Inspiration, Imitation, and Tribute appeared first on PolicyViz ..read more

For the past year, I have conducted a weekly “data physicalization” project with my colleagues at the Urban Institute. Each week, I would devise a new research question and give my colleagues the opportunity to input their own data using toothpicks in foam, stickers on the wall, wooden disks on a map, string tied together, dried beans in glass tubes, and more. Together, we would create a data visualization, be it an isotype chart, bar chart, scatterplot, histogram, or other illustration. Because the project led me to new insights on how people approach visualizing data, I started to think abou ..read more

Over the past three years, Eric Balash, a Tableau Visionary and Tableau Public Ambassador, has been running the “Back to Viz Basics” (B2VB) project. The idea is to create a community of people new to data visualization and provide them with a guided, bi-weekly prompt to create graphs, charts, and tables. Each week, Eric and his team publish a relatively simple data set and ask participants to, quite simply, create and share a graph. The graphs start simple—line charts, bar charts, pie charts, scatterplots, and then move on to more bespoke or non-standard charts, like beeswarm charts and Sankey ..read more