Category: data visualisation

Simple data visualisations have become key to communicating about the COVID-19 pandemic, but we know little about their impact

If you had mentioned ‘flattening the curve’ in 2019, chances are you would have been met with a blank stare. However, almost halfway through 2020, the language of data visualisation has become commonplace, and data visualisations are widely used to communicate about the pandemic to the public. However, as Helen Kennedy observes, their power to … Continued

Mapping the impact of UN Sustainable Development Goals on global research

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent one of the largest and most sustained influences on global research to date. However, charting the effect of these 17 goals on the global research community is a complex task. In this post, Martin Szomszor draws on the findings of a recent bibliometric study to produce a ‘citation map’ of sustainability research, which […]

Male authors outnumber their female counterparts on international relations course reading lists by more than five to one

Do scholars produce and reproduce a biased representation of the academy when compiling their taught course reading lists? Following a year-long mapping exercise of the university’s entire international relations curriculum by a group of PhD students at the LSE, Gustav Meibauer, Kiran Phull and Gokhan Ciflikli found that male authors continue to significantly outnumber their female counterparts, with little discernible […]

Seven functionalities the scholarly literature should have

Some of the most basic functionalities to be expected of a digital object continue to elude scholarly articles, making the literature much less useful than it could be. Björn Brembs has compiled a short list of seven such functionalities that academic publishers looking to modernise their operations might invest in; from unencumbered access and improved social components, to dynamic data […]

“Words divide, pictures unite” – great historic examples of the use of data visualisation for research communication

Students, researchers and academics from across a variety of disciplines use data visualisations and infographics in their blogs and projects to better tell the stories in their data and enhance audience understanding. As part of a series previewing their new book Communicating Your Research with Social Media, Amy Mollett, Cheryl Brumley, Chris Gilson and Sierra Williams explore a short history […]

How is data science different to mainstream statistics? Communication and visualization are key features of analysis.

Hadley Wickham argues statistics is a part of data science, but not the whole thing. Data science is addressing many of the areas ignored by mainstream academic statistics. For example statistics has a lot to say about collecting data but little to say about refining questions crucial for good analysis. The end product of an analysis is not a model: it […]

The availability of open data and new trends in data visualisation will transform how we understand our cities.

Due to the increasing availability of large urban datasets, it is now becoming easier to produce online visualisations that capture and help interpret the complex spatial dynamics of cities. Duncan A. Smith argues that as further open datasets are made available, … Continue reading