Three Questions With … Elijah Meeks!

And more from the last week on Nightingale

Isaac Levy-Rubinett

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3 min readSep 18, 2020

We’re excited to introduce a new segment here on The ’Gale called “Three Questions With …” in which we, as you might guess, ask three questions to data visualization practitioners. The questions will stay the same but the people answering will not; we will feature designers, analysts, artists, curators, and more who work in data visualization.

For the inaugural “Three Questions With …” we caught up with Elijah Meeks. Elijah is the Chief Visualization Officer at Noteable.io and the Executive Director of the Data Visualization Society. He’s spent over a decade building and writing about data visualization. Thanks, Elijah!

Three Questions With … Elijah Meeks

1. If you could be any type of chart, what would you be?

I would be a network diagram because they’re inscrutable and intimidating and people love them without understanding them and they show up in the poshest places like movies and CEO slide decks and terrifying dreams.

2. If you were stuck on a desert island, what viz would you want to create and what would you use to make it?

I would make a 3D pie chart because, while it’s horrible as information visualization, it’s the only edible kind.

3. What is one visualization that has inspired you?

I love Ben Fry’s visualization of Darwin’s Origin of Species which I think was amazing in how it revealed that “static” or “finished” things like Darwin’s books are actually dynamic and evolving in a way that’s normally invisible.

In case you missed it …

Three Dynamic Texts to Include in Every Dashboard

“One of the first things you learn in data visualization is to get rid of words. Less text, less lines, less noise — less, less, less. So, why am I encouraging the use of more text? Because, to my chagrin, there are some things that are, and always will be, communicated more effectively with text.” Jenna Eagleson on how to use text effectively in the instances when it is needed.