Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 04/10/2026The 2026 World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship just wrapped up and solvers continue to get faster. Here're trends of recent top finishers with 2 stories: the consistency of former champion León and the sharp 2026 improvement of Peng. #dataviz #jigsaw worldjigsawpuzzlechampionship.com 040
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 02/10/2026I made a version with region aggregation to get Europe and Asia on the scale of Canada and Mexico. Also tried a P-spline smoother but with a break for Covid. Preliminary data (Jul, Aug) not shown, so not getting the 2026 summer/World Cup bump. #dataviz 040
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 20/09/2026Is this a hollow bar chart, some kind of a clever compromise for those who want and those who don't want summary bars? From @schreinerdrew.bsky.social in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Excellent data sharing makes for a quick remake try using just lines at the means. #dataviz 072
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Here's a makeover retry using the same colors. Not entirely happy with the labeling, but interesting to try to mix continuous and categorical nature of the time variable using stacked area and stacked bars. The 80s vs 90s shift is easier to see. #dataviz 3162
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 14/09/2026When do you stop adding pies and use a different chart for a time samples? Pies from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling.... Data in ALT text for a #dataviz mini makeover challenge. 240
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 13/09/2026A new Neil Sloane video on Numberphile, in case you need a dose of math joy. youtu.be/A020pGO5MBs?...youtu.beThe Immortal Kangaroo Sequence - NumberphileYouTube video by Numberphile 120
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 09/09/2026I'll be working the demo floor at JMP Discovery Summit in Baltimore next month. Bring your Graph Builder questions! community.jmp.com/t5/Discovery... 000
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 30/08/2026World's strangest broken axis? It looks to be a negative break, with the 60-120 distance being greater than the 0-60 distance. Or does the ⊣⊢ signify something else? #dataviz 210
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 29/08/2026Cool to see my Steepest webapp in @visualisingdata.com's newsletter. Unfortunately, Carto just started requiring API keys, so there's a watermark until I get that resolved. xangregg.github.io/steepest 000
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 14/08/2026My Arya list for #dataviz: radar charts, log-scale bars, smiling beeswarms, gratuitous quadratics. 010
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 13/08/2026Nice detailed heatmap but I can't help think of all the dots that are hidden under the state borders. #dataviz 060
Reposted by Xan GreggBrad Jones @bradjones.bsky.social · 10/08/2026Did you know that Coloradans have wagered more than $1B on table tennis since 2020? I sure didn't. Sports betting is a little bit of a foreign topic for me, but it was eye-opening digging into the numbers. www.co-political-landscape.org/1-billion-on... 2228
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 09/08/2026Chess position recall by age and rating. The paper found age insignificant because it only looked at its linear effect, but recall drops after age 50 regardless of rating. #dataviz 032
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 29/07/2026I added a single-color mode to my steepest-roads app to put everything on an equal scale instead of highlighting the top ranked roads in a different color. xangregg.github.io/steepest/ 030
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 26/07/2026Short blog post about my "Steepest road in town" webapp. rawdatastudies.com/2026/07/26/m...rawdatastudies.comMapping steep roadsDesign choices and regrets for a webapp I made for mapping steep roads. 3162
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 26/07/2026Before I had an e-bike, I planned my bike trips to avoid steep hills and dreamed of an app to help. Now with AI, I can build my own. Red for steepest, indigo for others, yellow underlay for long inclines. Varying road width for elevation is my #dataviz flourish. xangregg.github.io/steepest/ 080
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 23/07/2026The green lines are standard deviations above the model in red. Interesting way to see residuals while keeping the data in its original context. #dataviz 070
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 11/07/2026That far left data point has an out-sized amount of leverage on the quadratic fits. For comparison, here's a smoother on the data behind the middle image. 030
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 05/07/2026This fit didn't look like p=0.020 to me, so I extracted the data and checked. It looks like the Line+CI is for all the data, but the stats exclude the low outlier points. #dataviz jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... 182
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 05/07/2026The caption says "Each box represents the median and upper/lower quartiles with the whiskers showing the 5th and 95th percentiles, and any points beyond this range shown individually." Why not use a standard box plot? Is this a common/named variation? #dataviz journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... 021
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 03/07/2026This chart from www.researchgate.net/publication/... is akin to the ones in my paired charts study. Interesting how the two groups are the same by any statistical measure but the box plots and violins could pass as different. Original and my repros #dataviz 000
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 26/06/2026Mildly annoyed that the caption says the dots are at 10 week increments, but there are 17 dots on the left side and 15 dots on the right side (12.7 week incr). Surely just a caption error not affecting the analysis, but still... #dataviz Dementia vs shingles vax paper www.nature.com/articles/s41... 140
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 13/06/2026Just realized that with a different color scheme, my baguette prices dot plot starts to look like baguettes. #dataviz 281
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 10/06/2026How would you remake this #dataviz from Nature? My wrong first impression was that ChatGPT usage is declining after being steady at 1%. Scraped data values are in the ALT text in case anyone wants to try it. Original source is pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/.... 140
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 08/06/2026Is it a treemap? Is it a bar chart? It's a packed bar chart! Bonus chart from my look at the data behind Le Baguette Index: number of participating bakeries in each city. Almost 1/5 are in Paris. #dataviz 030
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 04/06/2026I'm puzzled by this paper's lead chart. Connecting socioeconomic status levels emphasizes that difference, which is not the point of the paper. I reordered the data to connect across time points which helps see the gap widening over time and a different trend shape for the P and HP schools. #dataviz 091
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 04/06/2026The baguette prices at lebaguetteindex.fr present an interesting #dataviz challenge: 1500+ bakeries with very few unique prices. I'm not exactly sure of their jitter method, but I tried a few myself at rawdatastudies.com/2026/06/04/j.... 000
Reposted by Xan GreggMichael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 03/06/2026#stats #rstats If you use or teach EDA, you might be interested to learn a bit of its #history, from a _Nightingale_ article a few years ago. Sort of an ethnographic study of those who actually developed EDA nightingaledvs.com/remembrances...nightingaledvs.comRemembrances of Things EDA, NightingalePublished for Tukey Day, June 16, the 107th anniversary of John Tukey's birth This article recounts the origins and influences of the movement in... 0183
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 31/05/2026Weekly Bluesky posts tagged as #dataviz or #datavis. Highlighting #30DayChartChallenge and #30DayMapChallenge. Are the 30day challenges really so prominent, or so they weigh more heavily in the searchPosts api results? 071
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 30/05/2026A chess position recall study was lacking any charts, so I made one. The way the curves start to separate for advanced players is potentially interesting, but it's driven by just three participants and the Elo scores are very rough estimates. #dataviz www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 110
Reposted by Xan GreggXan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 24/05/2026Round 2 of my paired univariate chart survey is open for public testing. Now with a binary response (same or different) and fewer trials (72). See if you can beat my score. #dataviz pairstudy121.pages.dev?group=b3 041
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 25/05/2026Beeswarm makeover as a slightly smoothed Wilkinson dot plot. Original from www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Another difference: original violins have equal widths; mine have equal areas. #dataviz 050
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 25/05/2026My #dataviz of the "change" in US sleep duration seen in the NHANES survey when they changed the wording of the question from "how many hours" to "sleep and wake times". From www.normalcurves.com/sleep-and-ex... after a paper reported the finding without noting the wording change. 051
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 24/05/2026Round 2 of my paired univariate chart survey is open for public testing. Now with a binary response (same or different) and fewer trials (72). See if you can beat my score. #dataviz pairstudy121.pages.dev?group=b3 041
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 23/05/2026The Normal Curves stats podcast by @reginanuzzo.bsky.social and @kristinsainani.bsky.social gives me extra incentive for a long dog walk so I can finish an episode. normalcurves.comnormalcurves.comNormal CurvesWelcome to a lively conversation about science that’s like a journal club, but with less jargon, more fun, and a touch of PG-13 flair. In this introduction, Profess… 111
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 17/05/2026Monthly bus ridership for US "college towns" defined as municipal transit systems with >1.5 riders in school months vs summer months. Sorry for the crowded labels and random colors. Using a cycle-constrained p-spline fit so the starts and ends are aligned. #dataviz data.transportation.gov 050
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 17/05/2026Using US monthly bus ridership data, I ranked "college towns" based on municipal transit ridership ratios between school months and summer months. One of these doesn't belong. #dataviz data.transportation.gov/Public-Trans... 100
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 12/05/2026How dare that sentence length study approximate some novel publication dates with midlife of author. Let's see what it looks like with accurate dates. Much effort later: hmm, no difference in the trend curve. #dataviz (see the original at dragonfly.hypotheses.org/1152) 020
Reposted by Xan GreggThomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 07/05/2026Small multiples of radar plots are the non-whimsical version of chernoff faces and somewhat hooks into our pattern recognition visual system... That being said, I've never been compelled to make a radar plot... 251
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 02/05/2026I've posted the raw data from the pilot runs of my paired-chart survey (volunteers and paid Prolific workers). Not enough data to say much about different chart types, but at least some participants have good treatment-response correlation. github.com/xangregg/pai... 110
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 20/04/2026Another look at test-mode pairs-study results, comparing friend volunteers (you all) and Prolific workers. Each line is a different chart type—not a lot of difference there. I'm using Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance as a measure of surprise on the X. #dataviz blog: rawdatastudies.com/2026/04/19/v... 110
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 13/04/2026I decided to spring for a round of Prolific workers for my paired-chart study. Not surprisingly a drop in quality from the socials volunteers. I still need to do attention checks. Here's how responses aligned with a stat measure of diff. Still collecting data: xangregg.github.io/pairstudy121... 020
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 13/04/2026I added CSVW csvw.org support for metadata export in my RDS→CSV webapp. The out-of-the-box spec seems to be missing a lot of useful column properties like factor levels and ordering, but you have to start somewhere. xangregg.github.io/commacomma/ 010
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 12/04/2026Found a recent JavaScript parser for R data files at github.com/jackemcphers...; works well enough that I made a wrapper app for CSV conversion xangregg.github.io/commacomma/. Now I no longer have to dig up my R environment to make the conversion when I find an RData file in the wild. 010
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 30/03/2026Each run has a different mix of chart variations (but same 4 basic types). In case that makes anyone want to try the survey multiple times, go for it! 010
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 29/03/2026I've updated my pairs study from initial feedback (thanks!): new question framing, rebalanced effects, phone-friendlier and now showing your results at the end. Testing round 2 now open: give it a try at xangregg.github.io/pairstudy121... #dataviz 0132
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 23/03/2026I've been vibe coding a #dataviz study aimed at detecting "Is this anything?" between two distribution views. I could keep tinkering forever, but it's ready for test feedback. Try it out (10 min) and send me your comments about the study or about the app. xangregg.github.io/pairstudy121... 340
Reposted by Xan GreggNiklas Elmqvist @nelmqvist.bsky.social · 16/03/2026New post: "When Everyone Is Super" on what coding agents mean for CS research. Everyone got the same superpower. The hard parts of research (questions, methods, rigor) just became relatively more important. The easy part (code) just became relatively less so. medium.com/@niklaselmqv...medium.comWhen Everyone Is SuperWhat does coding assistants mean for computer science research? 063
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 08/03/2026#dataviz exercise: trying a smoothed dot plot version of the beeswarm. 1150
Xan Gregg @xangregg.bsky.social · 08/03/2026Mosaic (marimekko) chart of all the responses to "Are you a large language model?", severely cleaned, by source of participants. #dataviz 010