I watched a great TED talk this week, all about how data visualisation an be used to show clearly what is happening in complex systems. As we all know – a picture is worth a thousand words, so I thought I’d play around with the graph plotting options in Google drive together with some of our full time undergraduate portfolio performance data.

Two things are immediately apparent – firstly the University implementation of the WordPress blogging software does not allow for interactive chats to be embedded, whereas I can do this on my other site. Secondly, I was surprised that Google provided a couple fo graphing options that were not available in Excel

And finally, here’s a couple of visualisations. The first takes two differences and unrelated performance measures, and plots a scatter graph of these, with bubbles representing each award. The size of the bubble represents the cohort size. This might be useful to identify quickly how awards in a faculty are performing, and which ones deserve intervention based on their size.

The second graph is a tree diagram, which shows the relative size of each of the awards in a faculty. Again this might be useful to provide a quick visual idea of relative sizes of awards.