What rhymes with REDACTION?
At times, it is important to step in and protect the identity of someone sharing an experience in an Active Sensemaking collection to help keep anonymity. We ask people not to share identifiable details about themselves or the people they write about. Some projects center around sensitive or volatile subjects where identifying people or places…
Fiddling with data
I am always looking for new data visualizations that help stakeholders see something they might not understand with numbers or words. We can take the results from a Slider question and present it in its histogram format and most people will be able to interpret the responses overall. We can tell that the vast majority…
Statistics in the Triad, Part VIIIb: Binning, or Where the Data Are actually Concentrated
The first section, ‘Data distribution in a triad’, of Part VIIIa listed some of the quantitative methods for comparison of story data in triads, including confidence regions, point-counting of clusters, and smooth contouring. The last of these uses kernel density estimation (KDE) to calculate a probability density function (PDF) for the data. This statistical alphabet…
Statistics in the Triad, Part VIIIa: Smoothing, or Where the Data Are not Concentrated
This post is a cautionary tale — a warning buoy, if you will — about a widely-used method to aggregate and smooth data. The caution applies only to SenseMaker projects, which use ternary plots (triads) for both data collection and display, in particular those projects which yield high concentrations of data points near vertices. For…
Statistics in the Triad, Part VII: Mapping The Datasaurus Dozen
Note: If you landed here by searching on “datasaurus” (± “dozen”) and have no idea what SenseMaker is, you can jump to the graphical results. In an earlier post in this series, Part III: Random Data, I showed an example of a SenseMaker triad, with data clustered near vertices, along edges, and in the center;…
Statistics in the Triad, Part VI: The Story as Unit of Observation
If you had asked me a year ago to identify the primary unit of observation in a SenseMaker project, I would have said, without much hesitation, it’s the story, of course. When I started writing Part IV in this series on Confidence Regions, however, I had to revisit that question. I knew what was typically…
Statistics in the Triad, Part V: Closure and Causal Structure
Here’s one of those articles that I carry around, bound to me by neural Velcro, stored in Instapaper, and gestating in background mode: When Correlation Is Not Causation, But Something Much More Screwy. It’s a 2012 guest piece in The Atlantic by UCLA sociology professor Gabriel Rossman, merging two 2010 posts from his blog, Code…
Statistics in the Triad, Part IV: Confidence Regions
When we compare two (or more) groups of data on almost any kind of graphical presentation — histogram, box plot, x-y grid, time series, rose diagram, whatever — a near-universal question arises: Are the groups significantly different? The familiar answer is given by error bars or confidence intervals in x-y plots or bar charts, assuming an appropriate statistical model, for example…
Tom Brady and the Intrinsic Narrative
A few Sunday evenings ago, I watched Super Bowl LI, the climactic game of the 2016-17 season of the National Football League. With the loss and exit by the Dallas Cowboys earlier in the playoffs, I had no emotional stake in the outcome of the game, but at least some of the TV commercials might be…
Statistics in the Triad, Part III: Random Data
Story data in a SenseMaker triad tend to cluster in one of seven locations — the three vertices, the midpoints of the three edges, and the center. It’s also common to find “stringers” between the center and one or more of the other six loci (i.e., along the altitudes of the triangle); there are generally…
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