We are pleased to announce the publication of our new guide, ‘
Best Practices for Data Visualisation’, containing insights, advice, and examples (with code) to make data outputs more impactful.
The guide begins with an overview of why we visualise data, and then discusses the core principles and elements of data visualisations – including the structure of charts and tables, and how those structures can be refined to aid readability.
Concrete advice, examples, and code are presented to help improve the styling of charts, with a particular focus on accessibility. There’s a dedicated section on styling charts for
RSS publications, and readers are also provided with links to resources for choosing the right type of chart for the data at hand.
The guide is free to read
online, and source code and files are on
GitHub.
The authors welcome feedback and contributions from readers to help develop the guide. They are hosting a session at the RSS International Conference in Harrogate this September where they plan to work with delegates to expand and add new content to the guide. For more details on the session, visit the RSS
conference website.
‘
Best Practices for Data Visualisation’ is written by Andreas Krause, Nicola Rennie, and Brian Tarran.
- Andreas Krause holds a PhD and an MSc in statistics and computer science. His current position is senior director, data science, modeling and simulation, at Idorsia Pharmaceuticals Ltd in Basel, Switzerland. Andreas’s works include more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications, and he has delivered numerous presentations and workshops on ‘Graphics of clinical data: the good, the bad, and the ugly’ at various conferences and seminars.
- Nicola Rennie is an academic, data scientist, and educator. She is a Lecturer in Health Data Science at Lancaster Medical School, and her teaching experience covers topics including data visualisation, programming in R and Python, and how to effectively communicate the results of statistical analyses. Nicola is the author and maintainer of multiple R packages, and an active member of the R community - regularly presenting at R User Group Meetups and mentoring new members of the community.
- Brian Tarran is a writer and editor with 20 years of experience covering the research and data space. He has worked for the RSS for the past eight years, and was editor of Significance Magazine (a joint publication of the RSS, the American Statistical Association and the Statistical Society of Australia) prior to the launch of Real World Data Science.