Storytelling with Data

What Hacker News says

1. breckJun 2024
   Neat!

   Really clever simplicity on how you added gradients.

   This is one of my favorite spaces, so I'll add some generic advice which may or may not be helpful.

   I once had the privilege of working for Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data, as one of the engineers on their Grapher library (https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher), and learned a ton from them (and others on the team) about making great charts.

   My one piece of advice from looking at your examples would be: don't neglect title, subtitle, and caption! They would be so easy to do well because you've already created your "simple headers thingies". A few words go along way. Check out "Storytelling with Data" by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic for a great read on the subject. Owid's Grapher does those the best, IMO (followed closely by DataWrapper.de -- but that's not open source).

   At some point, if you keep up with this, you'll also want to add a dataflow library and DSL. Hadley Wickham's dplyr in R was the GOAT, and I copied that in my Ohayo tool and in OWID Grapher's CoreTable library (https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher/tree/master/packages/%4...). Jeffrey Heer's newish Arquero (https://idl.uw.edu/arquero/) library is also along those lines.

   Lately I've delving into Mike Bostock's new thing Plot (https://observablehq.com/plot/). So far, excited by it, but only spent a day or two with it at this point.

   I don't use emacs anymore, but hopefully something helpful in the comments above.

   Show morethread
2. frederikbNov 2023
   I really enjoyed Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. The author really breaks down the individual elements of good/bad visualizations using case studies with lots of actionable advice. Highly recommended.
   thread
3. nothrowawaysDec 2021
   I did a quick research on this topic sometime ago and the following was my conclusion.

   1. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

   2. Storytelling With Data

   3. Documentation pages of data Viz tools e.g. 1, 2, 3 depending on your programming language of choice.

   IMHO python ecosystem is still struggling with solid visualization as compared to JavaScript and R. Ggplot gives you shiny Viz but I'm not a fan of R.

   D3 and it's derivatives are awesome for dynamic Viz if that's what you are after. GL

   1. https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki

   2. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/ggplot.html

   3. https://matplotlib.org/3.5.0/index.html

   Show morethread
4. troelsSteeginApr 2020
   Personally, I think through writing. My first draft is what I write to help me understand a problem or an idea. That's good for me, but not so good for you. Useful writing addresses someone else's need. The questions are "who is your audience?", and "What do they need to know from you?" Writing for other people is communication. What are you intending to communicate? Technique, as illustrated in this article, serves that intention.

   Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's book "Storytelling with Data" is a good book on technical communication. TLDR: it's a process, and it's not about you, it's about them.

   Show morethread
5. hawktheslayerFeb 2018
   Storytelling with Data - because so many people are bad at PowerPoint: http://www.storytellingwithdata.com/book

   R for Data Science - because it is such a solid foundation for a career in business analytics: http://r4ds.had.co.nz

   And for extra credit two books I hope my collegues DON'T read since they are best kept secret are Cialdini's two books on influence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini

   thread
6. sogenSep 2017
   A more useful book is Alberto Cairo's Storytelling with Data, great examples and the reasoning behind it.

   And yes I have Tufte's books too.

   thread