Visualizing data

Philosophy and psychology of good plots

2016-07-04 — 2025-06-07

Wherein a grab-bag of links about making data visually comprehensible is presented, the UpSet algorithm is noted as a scalable alternative for set visualization, and data dashboards are also cited.

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 therefore attracts money, so it has its own notebook.

1 Membership, sets

We know about Venn diagrams, right? They’re 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 (Pérez-Silva, Araujo-Voces, and Quesada 2018) in R. Not only is that package discontinued, but the Venn diagram is just not that useful for more than seven sets. I think ggVennDiagram (Gao, Yu, and Cai 2021) still works if I like Venn.

However! There exists a better option: the UpSet algorithm (Lex et al. 2014). 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!).