Is there an elementary school teacher on your holiday shopping list? If so, check out Loreen Leedy's The Great Graph Contest! This picture book features Gonk (a toad) and Beezy (a lizard) as they compete to create the best* graphs…
Professional areas like science and law are dominated by written and spoken communication. For scientists, peer-reviewed journal articles and scientific conference presentations are the flagship communication formats. And then legal professionals spend much of their time reading and writing legal…
I’ve had Scott Berinato’s Good Charts on my bookshelf for a couple of years and finally had a chance to read it in June. I read a decent pile of research communication books and articles each year, and the same…
Before I started Data Soapbox, I was a practicing researcher. I designed research studies and collected, analyzed, and reported the data. As time went on, I got more and more interested in the reporting part of my job, to the…
Is your child gunning for my job as Head Nerd at Data Soapbox? (No?) Do they really like animal facts, at least? (Of course.)* Great! Allow me to recommend Steve Jenkins’s Animals by the Numbers: A Book of Animal Infographics…
Edward Tufte pulled me onto the effective data communication bandwagon circa 2007, in one of his data visualization workshops. This was one of the visualizations that Tufte highlighted: Tufte said that he had read about a single chart that had…
In my research and practice careers, I've worked on a lot of important and difficult health and social challenges. Substance abuse and addiction. Violence. Risky sexual behavior. This post is not about those issues. Instead, I will be addressing a…
Sometimes, Data Soapbox (i.e., me) provides pro bono assistance to members of our “support team” (in this post, my husband). Last week, my engineer spouse asked for input on the best way to visualize a boatload (technical term) of data…
In these pandemic times, like many people, I'm spending a lot less money on things like clothes, gas, and outings with family and friends. But you wanna know what I'm spending more money on? Arts and crafts supplies. Some of…
I don’t know about you, but I’m desperately dreaming about a post-pandemic escape. I have decided that, once in-person gatherings are safe again, I’m renting this amazing lake house outside of Charlotte where friends and I stayed for my 40th…