Congratulations to academic Andrew Heiss, who recently got a job as an assistant professor in George State University’s School of Public Policy. He applied for almost 200 jobs over 2 and a half years before getting the offer he accepted. He used R to compile and visualize his data in this post.
I chose to highlight Heiss’ project because it’s an effective use of personal data to tell a story : in this case how brutal the academic job market is in his field.
However; I also wanted to talk about the fact that his main visualization, the waffle chart detailing each of his rejections and offers, contains a well-known optical illusion called the Hermann grid illusion.
This illusion describes the weird, ghostly grey dots that seem to appear at the intersection of the grids between a series of boxes. I try to avoid creating visualizations that produce optical illusions — they can lead to headaches, eye aches, and nausea in some people.