This is a repository where I collect links to (highly selective!) articles/blogposts discussing good & bad data visualisation.
The work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press: The data visualisation pioneer who coined the terms "chart-junk" and "data-ink ratio".
39 studies about human perception in 30 minutes: Lots of details and references (39 to be precise;-) discussing the human ability to extract information from different visualisations, e.g. in judging differences in arcs, areas, angles, bars etc.; the role of colour in visualisations
Gelman and Unwin, Infovis and Statistical Graphics: Different Goals, Different Looks: The trade-off between infographics/infovis and (statistical) data visualisation; there is also a paywall blocked version
Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures: Key concepts include, "Know your audience", "Do not mislead the reader" and "Avoid chartjunk".
What I Learned Recreating One Chart Using 24 Tools: Interesting comparison of many popular data visualisation tools
Martin Theus' Statistical Graphics and more
Mistakes, we've drawn a few: "The Economist" takes a critical look on some of its own visualisations and shows how to fix/avoid mistakes
Wagenmakers and Gronau, A Compendium of Clean Graphs in R
Data is beautiful: 10 of the best data visualisation examples from history to today: Includes John Snow's cholera map
Mathematical art with R: harmonographs, Lissajous curves, Rose curves, Lorenz attractors, fractal ferns, and more
University of Melbourne: Statistical Consulting Centre: Why you shouldn't use pie charts
Pie charts are a bad idea. Yes. Always.
From Edward Tufte:
The only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in spatial disarray both within and between pies.
The only thing worse than pie charts are 3D pie charts (or worse still: blown-up 3D pie charts). Consider this:
Question: Which employee had the most sales in Q1 and Q2?
Kaiser Fung's Junk charts: Recycling chartjunk as junk art, or how to remake bad charts into good charts.
This is a highly selective list of links & references pertaining to data visualisation. It is neither exhaustive, nor unbiased.
Feel free to send me an email if you feel strongly about any information contained in this document.