The term “landscape” has something powerfully seductive about it. The imagery it evokes is so appealing, that further thought can be completely suspended. — Jones (1995) Seductive indeed: use story-related data on a contour plot to identify clusters or loci of desirable and undesirable responses; look at plausible pathways across the “topography” between these loci;Continue reading “Narrative Landscapes, Part I:
The emperor has no clothes that fit”
Category Archives: Sensemaking
Narrative Landscapes, Part I:
Statistics in the Triad, Part IX: Entropy, or How Much the Data Are Concentrated
The two previous posts in this series looked at where sensemaking story data are concentrated in a ternary. Part VIIIa explored the use of a non-parametric method for calculating smooth (continuous) contour lines, essentially a data-driven “guess” at the density of story points. Part VIIIb gave examples of a simpler, albeit less elegant, alternative —Continue reading “Statistics in the Triad, Part IX: Entropy, or How Much the Data Are Concentrated”
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 typicallyContinue reading “Statistics in the Triad, Part VI: The Story as Unit of Observation”
The Man Who Mistook His Graph for a Hat
Equilateral triangles have been used as a graphical tool for presenting compositional data for at least 150 years, most prominently in geology, metallurgy, and related areas of physical chemistry; archeology and anthropology; and population studies, including genetics. According to Howarth (1996)[paywall], they were also used as early as the 18th century to show mixing ofContinue reading “The Man Who Mistook His Graph for a Hat”
‘The Eggshell Thing’
This post originally appeared on the Cognitive Edge blog on December 15, 2010. My first project as an accredited practitioner was with a large international publisher that was trying to get a better sense of customer satisfaction with its products. I can still remember having some “disconnects” along the lines of, whoa, how does thatContinue reading “‘The Eggshell Thing’”