Good researchers understand the difference between research that may give a nugget (even if the nugget is ambiguous of full of flaws), and spindoctoring that takes a nugget and willfully uses it in misleading ways. I often get concerned that spindoctoring is overrunning perceptions of research and researchers. However, the solution is not to disregard all research. It is important to remember that that the alternative to good research is no input beyond “gut feeling” into decision making. And, when we concede this critical element in the advancement of our thinking on everything from consumer products to social policy, we have almost certainly let the spindoctors win.

The first book is a book called Diagrams: Innovative solutions for graphic designers by Carolyn Knight and Jessica Glazer I had extremely high hopes for. I had read great reviews, the cover had an interesting wordle-type graph on the front, and it came with a CD that came with “Copyright-free icons: arrows, flags, trees people and more.” In many ways this is a beautiful book. The graphics inside remind me of an interesting art show you may see in a hip gallery somewhere. Unfortunately, I should have heeded the title a bit more – this is a book squarely designed for graphic designers. I got a few ideas for some research visualizations, and the CD had a few icons I may use, but research is definitely not the key focus and this is not what I was looking for in terms of a solid reference.

After my experience with Diagrams, I decided to get more specific. I looked for a book that dealt with visualizations of quantitative data, and I was turned onto Stephen Few’s, Now you see it: Simple visualization techniques for quantitative analysis. The title alone had me hopeful and a quick perusal of the book lifted my heart as I saw some familiar graphs and charts. Few’s book is actually quite good, but I would say his treatment and breadth of visualizations are (for lack of a better word) clinical. There are many scatter plots, bar chars, and line graphs. This book would be a nice compliment to a basic statistics book. It shows how scatter or line plots change as a function of different relationships within data. I also like that Few presented some commonly used software packages for visualizations and presented some good evaluations and examples of these packages.

All in all, Few’s book is the closest I have found to a reference guide on visualization, but many of the techniques and visualizations were not terribly innovative, and maybe that is OK. However, I am still hoping that someone will publish a book somewhere in between these two. A quantitative focus, grounding and ease of use in Now you see it, with the boundary pushing and new ideas in Diagrams. If anyone knows these authors, please introduce them to each other. Until then, this researcher is still dreaming of the perfect companion to help visualize data.

I am blogging because my experiences have given me a unique take on applied research. Oftentimes I have small “thought grenades” that I think could be useful, but I never had a venue to pull the pin and share. After some encouragement from friends, family and clients I am hoping this can be that venue. I anticipate posting on a wide variety of topics: Research books that are worth the money and those that fall short, research in the news, some thoughts on best practices and maybe even some emerging research trends. But, I will try to post something once a week.

I also encourage you to leave feedback as a response in the blog or email me directly (joshua@morrillsolutions.com). The best scenario is if a thought grenade I throw out prompts a new thought grenade to be lobbed back to me. That back and forth would make this blog really worthwhile. So, thank you for checking in, I hope you participate, and keep watching for an update soon.