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datarocksnz.bsky.social
T. from Data Rocks
@datarocksnz.bsky.social
2.5K followers 2.4K following 950 posts
Dataviz | Information Design

The person behind The Dataviz Bookshelf, The Data Design Manifesto & The Design Matters newsletter series.

I don't use autocorrect. I own all of my typos.

https://www.datarocks.co.nz
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Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
nrennie.bsky.social
Genuary Day 3: Fibonacci forever

🎨 Figuring out how to programmatically create Fibonacci tiles

#genuary #genuary2026 #genuary3
Fibonacci tiles increasing in size and darkness as number increases. Pattern is repeated 4 times rotated around 360 degrees.
January 4, 2026 at 9:20 PM
datarocksnz.bsky.social
"What do you mean you're 'back to work' today??"

Inquires the Chief Purring Officer.
A pouty, fluffy black cat defiantly sitting on top of keyboard, mouse, pen and notebook of his human, who is just trying to get on with the 2026 work. His face seems to say "what is this work shenanigans about? No work, just pets!"
January 4, 2026 at 8:10 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
sml47.bsky.social
It seems it is once again time for everyone to familiarize themselves with this anti-imperialist classic.
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano
January 3, 2026 at 11:02 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
nocontexttrek1.bsky.social
Star Trek The Next Generation scene. The bridge of the Enterprise is shown from above looking down. Data sits at his console looking back at the rest of the crew, who are all passed out in various situations; on the floor, slumped over a console, or half falling off their chairs. Worf, notorious Klingon warrior, dangles over the tactical station. No caption.
January 1, 2026 at 3:49 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
anthonymoser.com
I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.
I Am An AI Hater
I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.
anthonymoser.github.io
August 27, 2025 at 5:04 PM
datarocksnz.bsky.social
Indeed!
December 30, 2025 at 5:51 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
datavizsociety.bsky.social
🎉 We’ve received 245 responses to the 2025 State of the Data Viz Industry Survey so far! Take the survey if you create #dataviz in any capacity (hobby, work, school, art), and help us spread the word: www.surveyhero.com/c/soti2025-b...
December 29, 2025 at 2:13 PM
datarocksnz.bsky.social
#dataviz folks will also appreciate this one.
December 27, 2025 at 6:59 AM
datarocksnz.bsky.social
Majestic Xmas floof
Picture of Ozymandias, a very fluffy black cat, against a yellow wall, sitting on top of his cat tower, from which a toy spider dangles. Ozzy is Data Rocks Chief Purring Officer and takes his duty very seriously.
December 23, 2025 at 8:15 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
tutormentor.bsky.social
I'm having fun digging into this visualization of attendees of 1994-2014 Tutor/Mentor Conferences that I hosted in #Chicago. I show a few at tutormentor.blogspot.com/2025/12/take... #datavis #dataviz

Thanks to IVMOOC students at Indiana University for creating this.
This is an interactive Kumu visualization of attendees at 1994-2014 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences, held in Chicago. The orange nodes are specific conferences and the green nodes are organizations that attended. Larger nodes show more frequent participation.
December 20, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
jdonland.bsky.social
The archives of the journal Visible Language, which has published interesting articles on #dataviz 📊 in addition to typography, calligraphy, spelling reform, and many other interesting things, are available for free online: journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl...
Archives | Visible Language
journals.uc.edu
December 20, 2025 at 3:53 AM
datarocksnz.bsky.social
Tables are #dataviz too!
datarevelations.com Steve Wexler @datarevelations.com · 16d
HOW COOL IS THIS TABLE?!

The table on the left shows my results for the first three tournaments I've played in Learned League. The green highlights are lightly-rendered bars.

I drew the bars in the table on the right in case you don't see them on the left.

Great way to augment a table.
December 19, 2025 at 6:04 PM
datarocksnz.bsky.social
This will be GREAT!
nrennie.bsky.social Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 17d
I'm really looking forward to chatting with @visualisingdata.com alongside @ansgarw.bsky.social all about the #30DayMapChallenge!

#RStats #DataViz
visualisingdata.com Andy Kirk @visualisingdata.com · 17d
Then S6E6 will be a #30DayMapChallenge special with two fantastic guests, @nrennie.bsky.social and @ansgarw.bsky.social, joining me to explore some of their amazing map submissions for this brilliant and unique challenge, which was held during November.

visualisingdata.com/podcast/
December 19, 2025 at 12:09 AM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
simongerman600.bsky.social
What an amazing way to visualize early human migration. Lovely map by @HarvardCGA. A great colour scheme and an appropriate map projection! Source: buff.ly/3lbxonJ
November 30, 2025 at 10:49 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
jenchristiansen.com
Rediscovered @unamandita.bsky.social ‘s delightful 2016 article “Everyone’s a Little Bit ‘Shapist’”—featuring a project by Nicky Case—while prepping for a math graphics talk. So good. Great to have an excuse to read it again. www.scientificamerican.com/blog/sa-visu... 📊 #sciart 🧪
Everyone's a Little Bit "Shapist"
On happy little squares, thought experiments and visualizing social systems
www.scientificamerican.com
December 14, 2025 at 7:19 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
datawrapper.de
This week, we celebrate the launch of our new website with a special edition of the Data Vis Dispatch! 🥳

See where you may have come across Datawrapper visualizations before, and have a peek at our brand new website while you're at it. 📊 👀 ✨

www.datawrapper.de/blog/data-vi...
December 16, 2025 at 10:24 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
datarevelations.com
Folks, here's a link to my newsletter where I express my exasperation with LinkedIn.

Maybe we can get a critical mass of data viz people to agree to put in real effort to make BlueSky social work.

mailchi.mp/b0a153ba5843...
I'm exasperated with LinkedIn. How about you?
mailchi.mp
December 17, 2025 at 5:18 PM
datarocksnz.bsky.social
#dataviz folks,
Let's bring Steve to Bluesky permanently to have fun with us here!

Shoot with your best tips to make the best of Bluesky!

My first one: @chezvoila.com starter pack!
datarevelations.com Steve Wexler @datarevelations.com · 18d
Folks, here's a link to my newsletter where I express my exasperation with LinkedIn.

Maybe we can get a critical mass of data viz people to agree to put in real effort to make BlueSky social work.

mailchi.mp/b0a153ba5843...
I'm exasperated with LinkedIn. How about you?
mailchi.mp
December 17, 2025 at 5:27 PM
datarocksnz.bsky.social
For everyone looking for alternatives: as a very long time Firefox user, I'm now using Waterfox. Seems pretty solid from what I can tell so far.
December 16, 2025 at 10:19 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
jacqueschrag.com
Hey folks - if you've tried to sign up to be able to post on the #dataviz feed in the last couple of weeks and haven't seen your posts, sorry about that! I've been preoccupied with some family matters and wasn't checking the sign up sheet. I've gone through and added everyone. Welcome!
jacqueschrag.com Jacque Schrag @jacqueschrag.com · Feb 29
Welcome to the 📊 Data Viz feed! This feed is designed to encourage sharing work and all kinds of discussion related to the broad field of data viz.

To participate, you must:
- Include 📊, #dataviz, or #datavis in your post
- Be added to the account list. Sign up here: forms.gle/mcVVczaQCBJL...
December 12, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
chezvoila.com
This Excel/PowerPoint plug-in is not available for Mac, so I can't use it, but it looks pretty good. 📊
Power-user for PowerPoint, Excel and Word l Advanced charts
Unlock powerful new chart types thanks to Power-user. The add-in will allow you create Waterfall, Mekko, Sankey, Tornado and more to give life to your data.
www.powerusersoftwares.com
December 12, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
nrennie.bsky.social
Here's a little round up of my 2025 year in #DataViz featuring

💜 Some of my favourite #RStats charts
💜 A look back at 5 years of #TidyTuesday
💜 Links to cool #QuartoPub and visualisation things I've seen this year

Link: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/year-in...
My year in data visualisation – Nicola Rennie
A round up of my projects this year, highlighting some of my favourite charts from 2025, and looking back on five years of TidyTuesday contributions.
nrennie.rbind.io
December 10, 2025 at 1:41 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
datarevelations.com
Come join me, @abmakulec.bsky.social, @acotgreave.bsky.social, and Jeffrey Shaffer as we explore some of the highlights (and lowlights) of data visualization in 2025.

Like the BBC News, our goal is to inform, educate, and entertain.

(But without any scandals).

buytickets.at/datarevelati...
December 4, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by T. from Data Rocks
datarevelations.com
You can now get LIFETIME access to my *updated* Visualizing Survey Data Using Tableau On-Demand course.

Learn more at bigpic.me/course

#surveydata
December 4, 2025 at 6:31 PM
datarocksnz.bsky.social
Good stuff
andrew.heiss.phd Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 26d
Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...
Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code. In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle. This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything. You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.
December 10, 2025 at 12:05 AM