flynn0013

Design is about making decisions. Here’s a good look at how different decisions about the same numbers can give you dramatically different maps: Hat tip to Justin Kiggins. One of the problems with a long-running blog like this is that I can’t remember if I’ve linked out to this series of blog posts on data visualization before or not. I am quite certain that I have not mentioned they are all collected in an affordable ebook . And there is also this list of what students find hard about making visuals . Someone on Quora asked what makes for an engaging scientific poster . Warning : contains me. There was a dreadful op ed in The Guardian about being a serious academic and how social media gets in the way of that or something. Anyone who claims to be “serious” today is setting themselves up for being lampooned for self-importance. See the # SeriousAcademic hashtag on Twitter for reactions, and Emily Willingham’s riposte . Janice Geary’s reaction, though, gave me pause: How is it t

Posters are a visual medium. But not everything is equally visual. A picture of a real object is very visual, and the best thing to have on a poster. A scatter plot is less visual. And text is the least of all. I was thinking about how I might make that point, um, visually, and I suddenly realized that I was just recreating one side of Scott McCloud ’s triangle from Understanding Comics . If you have not read Understanding Comics ... oh, how I envy you. You have that to look forward to. It is a wonderful book. Even if you are the sort who thinks, “Ugh, superheroes,” get over it, read this damn book, and have your consciousness expanded. It is an undisputed classic book. Here’s a except relevant to the matter at hand: And that’s the point I was trying to make, except McCloud did it better over twenty years ago. Received information is immediate; perceived information takes effort. This is why nobody likes posters with too much writing. It takes effort that, in a busy conference settin

Most of the readers of this blog are lurkers. They read, but they don’t feel obliged to make a comment, or send me a tweet, or email, or anything else. And that’s fine. I’m a lurker in many online spaces. Some poster viewers are lurkers, too. They will see your poster during the poster session, and they are interested, but they will not approach you. Instead, they will often wait until you are giving a tour of your poster to someone else. Then, and only then, will they walk up and casually listen over the shoulder of the person you are mostly talking to. I only learned about this during the last #SciFund Challenge poster class. Several of the class participants admitted that this was their poster viewing strategy. It’s understandable. Not everyone is comfortable walking up cold to someone they’ve never met before, and saying, “What’s to learn here?” (This is usually one of the first things I say to a poster presenter.) What can you, as a poster presenter, do to reach out to the lurker

Nature magazine has a feature on posters up today. It features my co-instructor in the # SciFund Challenge poster class, Anthony Salvango. Nature wants you to tweet your # PosterWins and # PosterFails ! Following that hashtag could be fun for this blog... I submitted this recent beauty as for #PosterWins and one of my own for #PosterFails. Reference Woolston C. 2016. Conference presentations: Lead the poster parade. Nature 536 : 115-117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nj7614-115a