I always chuckle appreciatively when I see good, creative work that recalls Oscar Wilde’s defiant “Talent borrows; genius steals.”
Here’s an example. I loved this table displaying patient satisfaction survey results by hospital floor compared with national benchmarks; it was presented in a graphic that a client showed us (and that I’ve recreated below). The combination of a type of deviation graph (black bar) and a modified ranked bar chart (each floor’s figure) makes it easy to compare results.
Clever, effective-and familiar. I’d seen that combination somewhere. To my bookshelf! In a few minutes, there it was, on page 180 of Edward Tufte’s classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
One need feel no shame in using great examples, modifying them to suit the data — indeed, I strongly encourage and applaud the practice. Open a book, surf the ‘net; there’s great work out there waiting to help illustrate both your talent and your genius. We need to communicate important data in clear and compelling ways if we want to improve our healthcare systems. GO FOR IT!
2 Comments
Jim Jones · April 3, 2015 at 2:42 pm
Katherine,
I have used several of your tips for displaying data – extremely helpful. But I recently used one that turned out to be a HOME RUN! It was the combination of a type of deviation graph and a modified ranked bar chart from your Genious Steals blog. I used it to compare various occurrence odds ratios for multiple surgical specialties in our NSQIP data. My colleagues loved it! Everyone thought it was a fresh, clean, and simple way to view the large amount of data. From now on this is an ACE in my deck of visualization tools.
Thanks so much!
Sandra Lawson · April 3, 2015 at 7:37 pm
Hi Jim,
Kathy and I were thrilled to hear that your use of the combo graph was a success with your colleagues! We love that viz too.