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From the Battlefield to Basketball: A Data Visualization Journey with Florence Nightingale

Radar plot of D.K.Metcalf’s NFL Draft Combine’s results
Radar plot of D.K.Metcalf’s NFL Draft Combine’s results
Her rose diagram is an effective use of a radial graph. It brings into sharp relief one of the central tensions of data visualization; to balance the precision and accuracy of information extraction with the challenge of how to engage, impact, and retain information for the end consumer. For starters, the polar stacked bar or coxcomb-style graph allows you to exaggerate the disparity between categories due to how the bars fan outwards. Going one step further, our brain loves to provide geometric definitions to data. It’s why radar or spider plots are as popular as they are (nobody is going to forget the

Pac-man shape of former Ole Miss receiver D.K. Metcalf’s NFL Draft Combine performance). Radial form factors are then optimized if the visualization naturally encodes traditionally radial or cyclical concepts (like launch angles in baseball, directionality of weather patterns, or time/seasons like with Nightingale’s original diagram).

My take on the Diagram of the Causes of Mortality
My take on the Diagram of the Causes of Mortality

My process of recreating the Nightingale rose
My process of recreating the Nightingale rose