Charlie Meyrick: Data Visualisation Diary

Bio

Hello and welcome to my personal website. I am a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. I currently run the Economics Observatory website and am manager of the Bristol hub. Having studied economics and mathematics at university, as well as completing a master's degree in international development, I am interested in improving the communication and accessibility of economic research. I also work as an editor and writer on a freelance basis.

The main purpose of this site is to document my Data Visualisation work – like a diary. This will be useful for me but may also help you – the user – learn how I work. Much of this work was completed in late 2021. However, I plan to update the site throughout autumn 2022 and into the new year.

Please feel free to use the dot icon in the top right corner of each chart to see the underlying code. This cutton will also allow you to download a png image of the chart. If you use my work, please credit me and/or my co-authors. Thank you.

Data Science students: To see a sample project page set up, click here.

To see a sample updater (still a work in progress) page, click here.

Some of my own work

Here is a chart I made for the new Rapid Charts Environment page.

We have been experimenting with different embed methods. The chart below (on land use for palm oil in SE Asia) is embedded into the page as a .JSON file, rather than as a .JS file. Going forward, this is probably what I will use.

Here is a live chart linked to the UK Gov API. This was built during a demo Data Science class in July 2021. It should auto update. A note: at the point of writing, Covid cases in Brsitol are concerning...

I am currently working on interactive area charts as I think these work well with the tooltip feature. Here is an example that I hope to use on the Rapid Charts environment page.

For the Rapid Charts Crypto page, I recently developed this auto-updating bar chart for stable coins. The chart measures the market cap for each coin and plots the bars accordingly. The chart has been made for 'dark mode'. The data is accessed via the Nomics API.

I am learning how to add more advanced interactive features to my charts. Here is a time series of different renewable energy sources. Users can toggle between the source to see how many GwH were generated in the UK per quarter. The seasonality of wind, solar and hyro is striking.

This chart was build in collaboration with Juliette Brown and Richard Davies. I think the tooltip feature works well in this context.

This is a chart built in collaboration with Ben Pimley. The data is from Surfers Against Sewage. There are no real surprises on this list

Recently, I have been working on a live dashboard for ONS fiscal data. This has involved using the ONS API and editing the URL to dig into each subsection of a given data series. Below is a chart that I am particularly pleased with. Overall, this was quite a challenging dataset/API to work with as the time unit changes mid series, causing all sorts of issues. In comparison, the labour market data and GDP data have been much more straightforward to work with.

Data

This is where I will store my data sources if I feel it is useful.

Methodology

This is where I will publish my methodology if I feel it us useful.