About

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

—John W. Tukey. Exploratory Data Analysis. 1977.

FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists use data to understand ourselves better — mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all.

As for me, I'm a statistics PhD. My dissertation was on personal data collection and how we can use visualization to learn about ourselves. That expands to more general types of data and visualization and design for a growing audience. I've also written a couple of books on how to visualize data.

For the New Readers

If you're new here, welcome to FlowingData. A good place to start is the archives where you'll find FlowingData's most popular posts or take a look at the FlowingData beginner's guide. If you like what you see, subscribe to the feed, follow on Twitter, or fan on Facebook.