Thoughts on Data

Reflections on Iron Viz 2023 Feeder Round & Three Lessons Learned

My first participation in Iron Viz Qualifier was a surreal experience.

As I hit the submit button with 10 minutes left until the submission deadline, I felt both wrung out and exhilarated. Like someone had squeezed champagne out of a tea towel. Bizarre metaphors aside, Iron Viz was an odyssey but still an overwhelmingly positive experience.

If you’re unfamiliar with Iron Viz, it’s an annual data visualisation competition built around the Tableau Public platform. Participants worldwide have a month to create and submit work on a selected theme during qualifier rounds, hoping their submission is good enough to qualify them … Read the rest

November 4, 2022
Down With Tadpoles, Up With Arrows | The Superiority of the Arrow Chart

So yesterday I published a blog on how to create a Tadpole Chart. And there was some great feedback and some great debate over the usability both on Twitter and on LinkedIn.

However, one tweet thread with Tableau Ambassador Christina Gorga and Data Viz Wizard Steve Wexler was particularly interesting

As much as I like the aesthetic appeal of the comet and tadpole, an arrow chart is now my first choice. The comet doesn’t work well if the two values are close together.

— Steve Wexler (@DataRevelations) October 3, 2022

After reading this, I felt somewhat foolish.

Another commenter … Read the rest

October 4, 2022
Tadpole Charts with Nicely Placed Labels in Tableau
I’m indifferent to amphibians, but I do like tadpole charts. In this blog, I’m going to show you the steps to create one with a little trick around labelling that may be useful in making this chart – but also for other charts in Tableau.

Table of Contents

This ones a bit involved, so here’s a table of contents:
… Read the rest
October 1, 2022
Analysing Interstate Migration Movements in Australia

I recently published a dashboard to allow people to view Australian interstate migration figures using ABS data.

As I mentioned in the post introducing the dashboard (which you can read here), interstate migration became a hot topic throughout the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We witnessed en-masse movements of Australians throughout the country – some were seeking an escape from COVID and associated lockdowns, while others were seeking a change of scenery as they realised they could work their high-paying jobs in Australian metro locations such as Sydney and Melbourne from the comfort of other … Read the rest

September 27, 2022
Visualising Population | Australian Interstate Migration Figures

I’m a migrant, and migration data has always fascinated me.

While the media focus is often on international migration to Australia, the COVID pandemic suddenly threw interstate migration into sharp focus, as lockdowns in various states may have incentivised different people to question where they lived and what type of life they wanted to live.

And as someone who was in the Queensland real estate market in 2021, it was often common to read stories about how people fleeing the lockdowns in southern Australian States and Territories were adding a lot of demand to a piping hot housing market.

As … Read the rest

September 26, 2022
How to build and interpret an index chart using Tableau

The index chart is a chart type that often comes in extremely useful for analysing the change in time series data.

You’ve probably seen these charts frequently used in finance – such as tracking a financial index like the S&P500. Here’s an example pulled from Statista looking at US Stock Indices since the start of 2022.

Notice how all series start at the same point, and the chart plots the relative change in each series over time. We can immediately see that NASDAQ has performed relatively poorer than the Dow Jones and S&P 500 during this period.

As you might … Read the rest

July 21, 2022

Got any book recommendations?