Jonathan Schwabish is the author oh the PolicyViz website and host of the PolicyViz podcast, both excellent resources for anyone interested in Data Visualization. He has also just published the book Better Data Visualizations, which I just received and may review it in the near future. At first look, it’s a really outstanding guide: clear, useful and comprehensive. I’m looking forward to reading it.

To the point of this post: as a companion to the book, Schwabish is producing an interesting series of free videos in which data visualization practitioners explain different types of charts, one at a time. He asked each participant three questions:

• Describe this chart type. What are things we should know about this particular graph?
• What should we do and not do when creating this type of chart?
• Can you share an example you really like?

The series, as Schwabish explains in the first video, will have 50 videos grouped in 8 categories: comparing categories, time series, distribution, geospatial, relationships, part to whole, qualitative data, and tables. A new video will be released every weekday until late March (there are 28 as of this writing). If you’d like to know more about box-and-whisker plots, histograms, streamgraphs, gantt charts, sankey diagrams and the like, take a look. It’s great initiative to help anyone interested to expand their knowledge about options to visualize different types of data, and to expand data visualization literacy in general.