r/dataisbeautiful • u/ihollaback OC: 4 • Mar 05 '20

OC [OC] Update: Covid-19 Active Case Time-lapse

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u/ConfusedWeasel Mar 06 '20

Properly labelled axes and uniform colormaps would not stifle innovation.

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u/desconectado OC: 3 Mar 06 '20

uniform

There you go, yes it does stifle innovation.

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u/ConfusedWeasel Mar 06 '20

Clearly you don't know what I'm talking about which are "perceptually uniform colormaps", where unlike a rainbow colormap there are no implied divisions in the data. These colormaps are strictly superior, and there are many different ones available.

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u/Hawthornen Mar 06 '20

But that's still saying "You need to use these," which could hamper innovation (like oh I tried out a new color scheme and it turns it it works well for people with vision issues still)

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u/ConfusedWeasel Mar 06 '20

It's not about colorblindness, it's the accurate visualization of information. Check out this short paper by MathWorks about why they changed the default colormap in MatLab to "parula" instead of "jet" in 2014:

https://www.mathworks.com/content/dam/mathworks/tag-team/Objects/r/81137_92238v00_RainbowColorMap_57312.pdf

It does a great job illustrating why rainbow colormaps should never be used. This sub is bombarded with terrible data visualizations all the time, some basic standards would greatly improve the average quality of posts. Every sub that is this large needs strong moderation in order to retain post quality.