Pocket reading list : Week 1.1 of May
What North Dakota Would Look Like if Its Oil Drilling Lines Were Aboveground : I'm fascinated by beautiful visualisations and I want to learn how to make them sometime in the near future. This is one such visualisation, that appeared on New York Times' The Upshot, where they depict the oil wells drilled to extract shale oil/gas in southern US but instead of drawing the wells underground, where they actually are, the authors drew them above ground, to provide a scale as to how deep/tall they are. What is also surprising is the sheer number of bore wells and how close they are to one another. No wonder extracting shale oil/gas at this level is causing serious environmental harm!
Seven Features You’ll Want In Your Next Charting Tool : There are lot of tools out there, offline and online, language dependent and language agnostic, that let you convert a dataset into a meaningful chart/plot/visualisation that will help you convey the message in the data a little easier. This is a brilliant article on features that one might consider essential in a tool if they wants widespread adoption and ease-of-use!
Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color? : You will have to incorporate color into your visualisation if you have data that has more than 2 dimensions. Now, the color scale you choose to display your dataset can have repercussions, such as making you see patterns where there aren't any or worse, not conveying a real pattern in the data! Now you decide which is worse. This article shows how beautiful a dataset can look if the right color palette is used and how easily one can convey the underlying structure in the dataset with the right palette. Another account of how choosing the wrong color palette can lead to bad things can be read here - Why rainbow colour scales can be misleading where the author shows how the data was misrepresented by the visualization/color palette leading the original authors of a paper to see a pattern where there wasnt any!
Why You Hate Comic Sans : Everyone hates Comic Sans. Heck, I did too at a certain point in time. But the weird thing is that I don't know why I hated it! I was just going along with every once else. This article makes an attempt to clear the misunderstanding between the font's intended usage and what it's legacy ended up being, thanks to the Digital revolution!
As you can see, the overall theme of the articles so far was visualisation, plotting, colors, interpretation and what not. So I thought that i'd end on a different note so here's a hip-hop-ified account of one of the founding fathers of USA, Alexander Hamilton, which eventually became a big broadway musical that is taking the country by surprise - Lin-Manuel Miranda Performs at the White House Poetry Jam.
Seven Features You’ll Want In Your Next Charting Tool : There are lot of tools out there, offline and online, language dependent and language agnostic, that let you convert a dataset into a meaningful chart/plot/visualisation that will help you convey the message in the data a little easier. This is a brilliant article on features that one might consider essential in a tool if they wants widespread adoption and ease-of-use!
Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color? : You will have to incorporate color into your visualisation if you have data that has more than 2 dimensions. Now, the color scale you choose to display your dataset can have repercussions, such as making you see patterns where there aren't any or worse, not conveying a real pattern in the data! Now you decide which is worse. This article shows how beautiful a dataset can look if the right color palette is used and how easily one can convey the underlying structure in the dataset with the right palette. Another account of how choosing the wrong color palette can lead to bad things can be read here - Why rainbow colour scales can be misleading where the author shows how the data was misrepresented by the visualization/color palette leading the original authors of a paper to see a pattern where there wasnt any!
Why You Hate Comic Sans : Everyone hates Comic Sans. Heck, I did too at a certain point in time. But the weird thing is that I don't know why I hated it! I was just going along with every once else. This article makes an attempt to clear the misunderstanding between the font's intended usage and what it's legacy ended up being, thanks to the Digital revolution!
As you can see, the overall theme of the articles so far was visualisation, plotting, colors, interpretation and what not. So I thought that i'd end on a different note so here's a hip-hop-ified account of one of the founding fathers of USA, Alexander Hamilton, which eventually became a big broadway musical that is taking the country by surprise - Lin-Manuel Miranda Performs at the White House Poetry Jam.