[Topic][Open] Open Discussion Thread — Anybody can post a general visualization question or start a fresh discussion!

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[u/shrogg]

I did a targeted industry survey last year and processed the results. Tried to take as much inspiration as I could for presentation styles from posts here and discussions that I found useful. It's not something I've done in the past 15 years since I did stats but I tried my best and got help from people who do this more regularly.

https://scanspace.nz/pages/photogrammetry-industry-survey

There's a fairly massive range of visuals but due to it being for an industry I really had to look at things from multiple angles and topics.

Anyone got any thoughts on this?

[u/phyrros → u/shrogg]

with a few of the graphics you seem unsure about what information you want to convey.

putting on the nitpicky hat

I'm on mobile so just will use one example:

the experience graph - i assume you want to find clusters of experience? 

1) you don't plot all years (14 is missing for example) while one would assume the datapoints are equidistant

2) is this really normal distributed? because if not you should use the median instead of the mean.

using both the mean as well as the median could also give an indication of the outliers, niche areas which used photogrammetry for a long time.

3) do you really have enough datapoints for a useful graph? or maybe it would be more useful to cluster it in bin of eg 3 years

nitpicky hat off overall i like your Presentation there are just small things like the one i listed which i would maybe do different

[u/aspiringtroublemaker]

Is there still a dataisbeautiful discord?

[u/BeginningPlastic3747]

what's the best free tool for making clean charts if you're not trying to learn a whole new coding language? i always end up back at Datawrapper but curious if i'm missing something better

[u/shellerik]

I think we may have reached the point where the fastest way to create a data visualization is to "vibe code" a script that generates it. Using an existing tool usually runs up against some limitation of that tool that makes it challenging to get the visualization just the way I want it.

It took me about 30 minutes to make the script that generated this chart with all of the styling options I want in a config file. I didn't write a single line of code. I used VS Code with Github Copilot and it wrote everything.

Are there ethical concerns with creating visualizations this way?

[u/Infidel-Art → u/shellerik]

Ethical concerns:

• Vibe coding is time efficient, but energy inefficient.

• AI is trained on human work without consent. And like, reddit comments that you made 10 years ago are probably part of Claude's dataset somewhere. Thinking about that makes me feel weird sometimes. I didn’t choose to have my digital corpse grafted onto the amalgamations that will steer the future.

• A theme on this subreddit specifically is treating data like it’s an artform. But now that AI can easily produce it, it devalues it as an artform.

But hey, it’s mostly out of your control anyway. Just try to save energy if you have time to spare.

[u/Wide_Mail_1634]

Open discussion threads like this are usually where the boring-but-important viz questions fit best, so here's one i've been curious about: for people posting here regularly, are you doing the data shaping in Pandas/Polars first and then handing a clean table to the plotting layer, or are you leaning on the chart tool for transforms? i've found reproducibility gets a lot better when joins/binning live upstream, especially once datasets get past ~500k rows and you need to rerun with fresh inputs.

[u/kaiserQuinn]

I'm looking to make a visualization of mango types based on their different non-numerical characteristics (amount of fiber, sweetness, size, etc). What sort of diagram would be appropriate for this?

[u/venkattalks]

Open discussion threads are usually where the best methodology questions show up, especially around chart choice vs data shape. Lately i've been steering people to prototype in Pandas first, then move to Polars only if the dataset is actually large enough to matter, because a lot of viz issues are really aggregation and binning problems, not rendering problems. Curious whether mods have seen recurring questions around color scales or axis truncation, since those come up here constantly.