Several days ago I saw a post on LinkedIn by Jornt Mandemakers with some very curious results from Gender and Generations Programme surveys. While representing interesting data, it was a perfect example of a way too common academic dataviz fallacy, an...

About this tutorial In summer 2024, Zotero had a major update to version 7. The update affected some of the setup routines that I outlined ages ago in the Zotero hacks post. The recipe laid out in that old post helped me painlessly update, move...

I selected 10 leading demographic journals and using Scopus data looked which demographers published most papers in there ✨ I also calculated the average citations per paper for these authors and average age of their papers (in color) 👀 Isn’t th...

For four years I’ve been following #30DayMapCallenge with admiration but not daring to commit to it. Producing maps was always an accompanying step in my main activities, and towards the end of a year it never felt possible to focus on producing...

For four years I’ve been following #30DayMapCallenge with admiration but not daring to commit to it. Producing maps was always an accompanying step in my main activities, and towards the end of a year it never felt possible to focus on producing ...

Did you ever think why we (okay, I’m clearly biased, maybe just many of us, humans) love maps so much? Why do they often work so much better than other types of dataviz? I think1 what makes the maps work is the speed with which we can recognize...

Did you ever think why we (okay, I’m clearly biased, maybe just many of us, humans) love maps so much? Why do they often work so much better than other types of dataviz? I think1 what makes the maps work is the speed with which we can recognize famil...

Deriving coordinates from a string of text that represents a physical location on Earth is a common geo data processing task. A usual use case would be an address question in a survey. There is a way to automate queries to a special GIS service so th...

Deriving coordinates from a string of text that represents a physical location on Earth is a common geo data processing task. A usual use case would be an address question in a survey. There is a way to automate queries to a special GIS service...

Faceting1 is probably the most distinctive feature that defined the early success and wide adoption of ggplot2. Small-multiples are often a great dataviz choice.2 But one common problem is when your panels for the subsets of data requite vastly diffe...

Faceting1 is probably the most distinctive feature that defined the early success and wide adoption of ggplot2. Small-multiples are often a great dataviz choice.2 But one common problem is when your panels for the subsets of data requite vastly...

One of the game-changing features of ggplot2 was the ease with which one can explore the dimensions of the data using small multiples.1 There is a small trick that I was to share today – put all the data in background of every panel. This can conside...

Quite often data processing or analysis needs bring us to write own functions. Sometimes these self-defined functions are only meaningful and useful within a certain workflow or even a certain script. But other self-written functions may be more gene...

Since R community developed brilliant tools to deal with spatial data, producing maps is no longer the privilege of a narrow group of people with very specific almost esoteric knowledge, skillset, and often super expensive software. With #rspatial pa...

FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar saw many surprising results. In fact, too many – some would argue. From the unbelievable loss of Argentina to Saudi Arabia at the very beginning of the group stage, via the loss of the magnificent Brazil to Cameroon ...

2022 No matching items 2021 No matching items 2020 No matching items 2019 No matching items 2018 No matching items 2017 February 5, 2017 ...

What is life expectancy? And even more important what it isn’t

It really is a remarkable achievement and maybe a lot of luck that the world mundanely operates with such a complex indicator as life expectancy. Unlike many statistics and quantities of general use that are being monitored and reported regularly...

I have to confess that the core message of this post is not really a fresh saying. But if I was given a chance to deliver one dataviz advise to every (ha-ha-ha) listening mind, I’d choose this: forget multi-category bar plots and use dotplots instead.