Every day we assess the world around us. We ask ourselves whether that decision we made was a good idea, what makes that person trustworthy, why we should or should not change something. We form a question in our head, collect data, analyze the information, and come to a conclusion. In short, we are all …
Have you ever stayed up late, staring up at the night sky, wondering “What is the difference between evaluation and research?” No?! Well, even if you haven’t lost sleep pondering this, we think it’s an important topic. Why? In this blog series, we’ll be focused on how to do an evaluation: how to determine the …
Finding your way: the difference between research and evaluation Read More »
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 …
Between a Graph and a Hard Place Chapter Two: Do it yourself Read More »
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
With great power comes great responsibility—that’s how I feel about data visualizations. Good ones help readers quickly understand the data and can convey an important message to a lot of people. However, bad data visualizations can intentionally or unintentionally mislead, causing us to come to the wrong conclusions. In this multi-part post, we’ll unpack some …
Hello, again! Are you ready to learn more about the right data for the job? We are reviewing the qualifications of various data to answer different kinds of research questions, just like we would review job candidates’ qualifications for a job. Last week we talked about the importance of what data were collected and how …
