Visualizing data

Philosophy and psychology of good plots

2016-07-04 — 2025-06-07

communicating
computers are awful
faster pussycat
generative art
making things
photon choreography
Figure 1

A grab-bag of links about making data visually comprehensible. For now, this is mostly a list of people I want to link to, but I might also share some insight into good communicative graphic design if, heaven forfend, I end up needing to pretend to be a graphic designer in some dire strait. A weird corner of this discipline is the specialization, data dashboards, which appeals to executives and thus has money in it, so it has its own notebook.

1 Membership, sets

You know about Venn diagrams, right? They are very hard to scale to many sets. As far as I knew the best option to plot them was vqf/nVennR which implemented the nVenn algorithm () in R. Not only is that package discontinued, the Venn diagram is just not that useful for more than seven sets. I think ggVennDiagram () still works if you like Venn.

However! there exists a better option, the UpSet algorithm (). I use UpSetPlot.

2 Resources

3 Practitioners

4 References

Gao, Yu, and Cai. 2021. ggVennDiagram: An Intuitive, Easy-to-Use, and Highly Customizable R Package to Generate Venn Diagram.” Frontiers in Genetics.
Heer, Bostock, and Ogievetsky. 2010. A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo.” Queue.
Lex, Gehlenborg, Strobelt, et al. 2014. UpSet: Visualization of Intersecting Sets.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
Lucchesi, Kuhnert, and Wikle. 2021. Vizumap: An R Package for Visualising Uncertainty in Spatial Data.” Journal of Open Source Software.
McInnes, Healy, and Melville. 2018. UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction.” arXiv:1802.03426 [Cs, Stat].
Olah, Mordvintsev, and Schubert. 2017. Feature Visualization.” Distill.
Pérez-Silva, Araujo-Voces, and Quesada. 2018. nVenn: Generalized, Quasi-Proportional Venn and Euler Diagrams.” Bioinformatics.
Wickham. 2010. Ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Use R!).