TASO's Evolving Data Visualization Guide: Bridging Reports and Social Media
The data visualization style guide from the Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education (TASO) group out of the UK has a lot of great materials (and lots of citations to work by me and Amy). It’s clear that this guide is under continuous updating and editing–it’s especially worth noting they have a recent “modified” date listed in December 2024–and many of the aspects of the guide are couched in terms of “we are currently developing...” or “as we figure out what works….” The piece that caught my attention was the section on adjusting charts for reports and social media usage. Report graphs include the figure caption in the document text and not in the graph image while the social media example places all text in the image, drops the figure number and footnotes, and is larger than the report graph. There are only two examples here, so I suspect they’ll update these over time with different formats for the different image size requirements on platforms like X and Instagram. Recognizing that people are going to want to post their data visualizations in different places and helping them to do so is a great aspect to include in a guide.
Written by Jon Schwabish
