We live in an era with “data is king” and that’s great. Unfortunately, data is hard to interpret. Edward Tufte has written phenomenal books on “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”. In them, he coined the term “data-ink ratio” and introduced other best practices.

That’s all well and good but how are mere mortals supposed to apply these theories on the web? As with most things web, we are faced with an overwhelming paradox of choice. Type dashboard framework in your favorite search engine if you don’t believe me.

I have tried many of these “build dashboards in 10 easy steps” tutorials. Some are really great. The opiniated ones frustrate you as soon as you try swimming outside the lane they picked for you. In my experience, the more mature ones are still implemented in JavaScript or TypeScript which makes data scientists recoil in horror.

D3 is incredibly powerful but its API is much too vast for my Grug brain. dc.js is slightly less intimidating, yet retains many of D3’s cool features (like Scalable Vector Graphics and transitions). I wondered whether PyScript was flexible enough to support the dc.js. Turns out, it was:

No discussion on data visualization is complete without a mention of Hans Rosling’s excellent 2006 TED Talk: