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Visualizing data

Philosophy and psychology of good plots

2016-07-04 — 2025-06-07

quality 5.6

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.
Rougier, Droettboom, and Bourne. 2014. “Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures.” PLOS Computational Biology.
Spiegelhalter, Pearson, and Short. 2011. “Visualizing Uncertainty About the Future.” Science.
Wickham. 2010. Ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Use R!).