Famously, Sherlock Holmes makes reference in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's mysteries to "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." In the story, a horse is stolen from a barn in the middle of the night; Holmes makes this reference; Watson replies something along the lines of, "But the dog did not bark;" Holmes, in his smugly self-satisfied manner responds, "That was the curious incident." The fact that the dog did not bark while a horse was being stolen indicated

Before we get started, let me reassure you: this is neither a year in review, nor a "my goals for 2018" post. As a person who still feels a little awkward about being his own advocate (despite multiple social media presences as evidence to the contrary), and who openly expresses his fear of thinking out loud, I am reluctant to drag the public along on a tour of my personal points of pride from the last year, nor to let people in on my half-formed ambitions and ideas for the

Inherent in the idea of remixing or remaking someone's existing, original design--in any milieu--is the conceit that you believe that you have something to add to the discussion. Maybe you can improve the visual appeal; maybe you can clarify the message; maybe you can add another layer of meaning somehow; or maybe you can shepherd the original vision across communities to a new audience. What to do, then, when faced with a remix challenge like "Global Temperature Change," 201

That is the tempo. Are you old enough to know that the title of this post is a Beastie Boys lyric? (Are you old enough to know who the Beastie Boys are?) Of all the tracks from their multiplatinum, 13-song "Licensed to Ill" album, "Slow and Low" is...one of the least popular. Based on Spotify track plays, “Slow and Low” ranks 10th. From most to least: Fight For Your Right (to Party); No Sleep Til Brooklyn; Brass Monkey; Girls; Paul Revere; Rhymin & Stealin; She's Crafty; The

Practicing complicated or bespoke Tableau development techniques is valuable, even if it doesn't always translate to popular acclaim. There’s barely anything flashy about my submission for Makeover Monday this week, which was an analysis of adherence to various restrictive diets by people in five different regions of the world. The dashboard is in a 1000x1000 square canvas, my recent dimensions of choice. The top half of the viz leads off with a headline, followed by some tex

Greetings and salutations! Many of you are hard at work on your IronViz submissions, which is what I SHOULD be doing, but it’s haaaaaaaaard. And I don’t waaaaaaannnaaaa. In the meantime, let’s talk about a fun little trick that I used for this week’s Makeover Monday, one that has an extremely limited use case but is a fun little tool to have at your disposal. I’m talking about the rotated scatterplot. For some viz I worked on the past, I was underwhelmed by the quality of the

A gentle reminder: if you haven't looked at, or maybe even filled out, my survey about failure, I'd really appreciate it if you did. It only takes a few minutes and I'd love to get some different stories and perspectives for something I'm working on: https://t.co/p7Fim8ysB7 Aren't you darling? Just as sweet as peach pie in a cotton candy basket. Now let's get on with the show. Although I am not a child of the 90s, I nevertheless developed an incredible fondness for one partic

First, a request: if you haven't looked at, or maybe even filled out, my survey about failure, I'd really appreciate it if you did. It only takes a few minutes and I'd love to get some different stories and perspectives for something I'm working on: https://t.co/p7Fim8ysB7 Thank you. You are very nice and everybody says so. Now, on with the post. I have a challenge for you. If I asked you to design a Tableau dashboard in the style of Jonni Walker, could you do it? Actually, l

Back in the 1990s, I once was stuck on a plane out of Dallas with an extraordinarily memorable stranger. In the years since, I have usually referred to him, derisively, as “The Man’s Man,” in that he was the Hollywood stereotype of a brash, bullying salesman. Middle-aged, rumpled, sweaty, and several score pounds past his high-school-football-playing weight. He reminded me of the characters in the old recurring Saturday Night Live sketches about Bill Brasky. He collapsed into

(Charlie Hutcheson has written a fine technical review of my viz for this week as part of his Takeapart Tuesday series. I encourage you to read it, and all of his posts. For myself, I wanted to write about the “why” of this week’s viz, rather than the “what.”) I don’t presume to know what was inside the heads of the Andys when they started #MakeoverMonday in 2016, but I believe their intentions were largely to engage the critical thinking of the Tableau Public community, by h

Among the many internet topics that are sure to generate attention and engagement -- right up there with kitten videos, "what Hogwarts house would you be sorted into," and seeing where your state/city ranks in anything -- talking about "introverts vs. extroverts" is a surefire winner. I'm a self-identified introvert, having grown up sibling-free, with the liberty and propensity to read uninterrupted for hours on end. Various online tests have put me solidly on the introvert e

As might be evident to close readers, when it comes to Makeover Monday designs, I often prefer to go in a different direction with my revizzing than what I expect people to choose to pursue. Likewise, if I get off to a late start that week, I see what the earlybirds and jackrabbits (including, but not limited to, @thedataduo) are doing and recalibrate my plans accordingly. I don't want to create "just another version" of someone else's vision. Why do I approach Makeover Monda

This week's #MakeoverMonday was a re-imagining of a chart that Andy Kriebel did 10 years ago when he first started using Tableau. It was about comparing the rising cost of oil and of gold as commodities. The premise was they were somewhat, but not exactly, linked together in value. By building the chart, we wanted to see how this relationship changed over time, and whether the commodities were truly correlated. Early Returns The first few things that I saw when people started

(UPDATE April 22, 2017: A different technique for creating a viola chart, submitted by Ben Young (who is not on Twitter), has been added to the end of this post. It differs from my technique in that they are based on different means of creating Sankey-esque curves. My thanks to Ben for doing the work to figure out an alternate technique that could well be more practical in many circumstances.) One fine Makeover Monday found us working with some apparently Russian survey data.

Sometimes, paradoxically, the best results can be born out of pure laziness. This was the case for my most recent contribution to the epic Makeover Monday project, now in the 9th week of its second year. In Week 8 of 2017, the data set provided for remixing was “EU Potato Sector.” As inherently thrilling and intriguing as that data seemed, I was fully engaged with the Hacking Open Data project, which took up most of my vizzing time outside of work. After completing that, I ha

There is an award-winning weekly project among people in the Tableau data visualization community called “Makeover Monday.” Each week, the organizers, Andy Kriebel and Eva Murray identify a data visualization that has appeared publicly and challenge participants, using the same data (and only the same data), to create a different version of the published work. Tell the same story differently, tell a better story with the same data, or just try creative techniques to accomplis

As part of the #MakeoverMonday series, I revisited a Slow Journalism article about the career of the late actor Alan Rickman. While the original viz was data-heavy and maybe a little overburdened with encoding of values, I decided to bring more of an audiovisual element to the remake. I scoured YouTube for clips (as family-friendly as possible, although that didn't turn out to be doable in every instance) that highlighted Mr. Rickman's performances in each of his movies. Afte

As part of the #MakeoverMonday series, I reworked a FiveThirtyEight study on what words and phrases different media types use when they are trying (or failing) to avoid saying "groin." For some reason, this is a mild taboo in broadcasting, even though everyone who has ever played sports at any level has gotten hit in the groin at least once. I decided to use an Olympic theme, because we're almost to the kickoff of the Rio Summer Games, and because it gave me the chance to mak

As part of the #MakeoverMonday series, I created this visual representation of the partisan nature of public statements by elected officials in the wake of the Pulse nightclub mass murder. A link to the interactive workbook is here. It is unusual for me to create something this dark, and this heavy on illustration vs. data presentation, but this seems to be an issue where logic and data journalism don't seem to be making much headway. I chose to include the names and ages of

As part of the #MakeoverMonday series, I created this Raymond Chandler-meets-anime visualization of the types of theft that took place in Japan during the year 2012. The style and concept were heavily influenced by @Michael Mixon (@mix_pix on Twitter), who consistently delivers beautiful and creative Tableau work. A link to the interactive workbook is here. It is unusual for me to create something this dark, and this heavy on illustration vs. data presentation, but this seem