Data-Visualization

A slow pace, to be sure, but I have been adding to a dashboard of SNAP Performance Indicators over the past year, based on the SNAP data I’ve been cleaning and compiling over the past 2 years, and built with the Observable Framework library. You can view the dashboard here. No extremely tricky visualizations, but that is because I have found that these datasets that are simple tables by state each year mask the complexity of federal and state policy around implementing SNAP benefits. The dashboards become more and more text heavy, I realize, as I absentmindedly pull in context that I believe is valuable to know alongside each chart. Additionally, the recent changes to SNAP in 2025 have complicated any forward-looking projections. ...

Recently on YouTube I searched “population apportionment” to find that many of the recommended videos across different channels looked the same and appeared to be AI-generated, heavily automated, and extremely low effort. Of the 18 Recently Uploaded videos for the search, 10 of theme were all from this same “family” of channels: 2 to 3 minute, political-themed questions with an AI-generated man or women in the thumbnail, leading to an animated PowerPoint presentation. ...

The Trump Administration has a famously loose approach to data visualizations. If the data doesn’t match up with what you want, grab a marker and draw over the visualization until it does. Source: New York Times article showing hand-drawn modifications to official NOAA weather map The USDA released an announcement, USDA Invests Up To $1 Billion to Combat Avian Flu and Reduce Egg Prices, with two charts that made some questionable decisions worth discussing. ...

What follows are a few takeaways from a recent app launch, where I had some successes and some things I had to fix. I also maintain dashboards for a wide set of clients on a different project that will be overhauled soon, and would like to apply these learnings during the redesign. The three guiding business questions for initial design are: How are we getting users? What our users are finding value in when using the application? ...