Library Research Service

Research can be a scary word that comes with a lot of fear about our own skills. We think of experts conducting field work, gathering data, and writing long, technical reports. Like reading a foreign language, it’s easy to feel ill-equipped for deciphering what it all means. Chapter one of Between a Graph and a Hard Place gave you the lexicon for understanding existing data and research. We covered a myriad of topics from checking sources to reading data visualizations that you can find here in case you missed any. Now, we’re excited to introduce chapter two of our blog series...

Hi there, readers! We have so enjoyed having you on this data journey with us. The posts we’ve shared since March are an introduction to data literacy, and we’re wrapping up that theme today. Fear not! This series—Between a Graph & a Hard Place—isn’t going anywhere. We’re just starting a new theme, like the next chapter in a book. (We’re data people, but who can resist a book metaphor?)   We hope that you’ve learned something—preferably lots of things—and will join us on the next leg of our journey. Based on surveying you, our readers, the new direction we’re taking is to...

If you walk into a hardware store, you might see an entire aisle of screws—short ones, long ones, phillips head, flat head, ones with weird little anchors on the ends. They might all be screws, but they each serve a specific purpose—for wood or cement, for different screwdrivers, for thick or thin materials. It’s the same with data visualizations. They might all be charts, but pie charts, bar charts, and line charts all serve a different purpose. When data visualizers use the wrong one (often unintentionally), you’re left with a chart that doesn’t really make sense.  Below are charts using the...

When the COVID-19 pandemic began a couple of months ago, we at LRS began thinking about how we could help. What skills could we share that might be useful to library staff and our communities?  So many different sources were releasing charts and graphs to help us all understand what was happening, and we were all trying to process a lot of data every day. LRS created the Between a Graph and a Hard Place blog series to provide strategies for looking at all kinds of data with a critical eye—strategies that could be used in a library or in...

I love color. As long as I can remember, I have kept my crayons organized in rainbow order. It makes me happy to see them that way! It’s a little tedious with the magical 64 pack of crayons, but totally worth it. I am an extreme example, but humans in general are visual creatures. Color impacts how we perceive and understand visual information—including graphs, charts, and infographics.  A good data visualization combines a thoughtful display of the data with strong art and design principles, including color. Our brains are wired to pay attention to color, even if some of us perceive...

Welcome to part 2 on data visualizations. If you’re just joining us, we talked last week about how the y-axis can be altered to mislead a reader about the data. You can find that post here. Now, let’s jump right back into another big data visualization misunderstanding.  The goal of data visualizations is to allow readers to easily understand complex data, but sometimes it’s the data visualization that we don’t understand. Certain techniques are utilized because they are the best fit for the data—not the best fit for the reader—and that can cause quite a bit of confusion if we don’t...