Between a Graph and a Hard Place

What’s your goal here?

August 2020

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 …

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Let us know what you think!

July 2020

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 …

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Visualizing Data: Color

June 2020

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 …

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Visualizing Data: a misleading y-axis

June 2020

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 …

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