Saturday, May 13, 2017

Data videos

It may be because I'm getting older, but in the past few years I've grown a tiny bit less fond of intricate interactive graphics, and a tiny bit more fond of videos and animations that explain complex ideas and data in a linear fashion. This post collects some I've seen this week.

The first one is an entertaining overview of the Dunning-Kruger effect (less knowledge leads to more confidence in your own opinions) narrated by Stephen Fry. Fry mentions something that Nigel Holmes has said for many years: If you make people smile and feel good before presenting a message, the message becomes more persuasive. It turns out that fun —and not just pure clarity and efficiency— matters a lot:



Amanda Cox's OpenVis presentation about the visualization of uncertainty is very informative. She even discusses hurricane forecasts and the cone of uncertainty, referring, I believe, to the roundtable Jen Christiansen, Mark Hansen, and myself had a while ago.



All OpenVis talks can be found here. Have fun.

The Pew Research Center is launching a series about elementary statistical methods titled Methods 101. Here's the first video, explaining random sampling with some good analogies:



Finally, Sophie Sparkes chose The Truthful Art for Tableau Public's first Data Viz Book Club. Sophie and Andy Cotgreave have just posted a conversation about it. I'm happy to see that they mention that it surely is a visualization book, but that I was aiming at something a bit bigger: A book about reasoning.