The Wall Street Journal recently published a nice, interactive graphic piece called "Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines," which contains a series of graphs showing the incidence of selected infectious diseases by state and year. Here's the one for measles. My first impression was, "Wow,
In my previous post, I examined how the dual scales on this jobs chart are sending an inaccurate message. But my efforts to remake alternate graphs from the raw data revealed another source of message corruption. Reading the graph text closely, you see that the red line is really an
I saw this "really striking" jobs chart on Twitter recently. Can you see why the data is not as striking as it appears? It certainly looks striking. The red line (labor force without a bachelor's degree) and the blue line (labor force with a bachelor's degree) were moving in lock step
Ease-of-use and convenience functionality have been the focus of graphics work for JMP 12. The most prominent ease-of-use change is the drop zones in Graph Builder, which now light up whenever you're dragging something in. Now everyone can find the "secret" drop zone just inside the axis. It even has a
Scagnostics, scatterplot diagnostics, was discovered by John and Paul Tukey and later popularized by Leland Wilkinson in Graph-Theoretic Scagnostics (2005). These analyses were redefined in High-Dimensional Visual Analytics: Interactive Exploration Guided by Pairwise Views of Point Distributions (2006). The beauty of scagnostics is the ability to visually explore a data
The name “dot plot” can refer to a variety of completely different graph styles. Well, they have one thing in common: They all contain dots. For analytic use, the two most prominent styles are what we might call the Wilkinson dot plot and the Cleveland dot plot. The Wilkinson dot
It's wonderful to see the #onelesspie effort gathering interest, especially on twitter. For my introductory post yesterday, I wanted to focus on encouraging people to improve pie charts everywhere. In this post, I want to show you how I remade the pie chart in JMP. Here's the original: The first
It's become too easy and common for data visualization practitioners to point to flaws in pie charts and other artless visualizations. Far better is to pair criticism with demonstrated improvements. Kaiser Fung's junkcharts blog is the pioneer in backing words with actions, but there’s nothing stopping the rest of us
JMP 11 provides a convenient way to convert a continuous numeric column into a new column that represents a sequence of ranges. The command is called Make Binning Formula in the Columns menu. It brings up a dialog that lets you interactively choose the binning parameters (offset and width) and
JMP is all about data exploration, and a big part of exploring is not knowing the questions up front. JMP 11 adds a feature called “transform columns” that allows you to create a temporary computed column within almost any column list in JMP. That means you can create a new