Scientific visual presentation Oerlemans [2005]
Apr 01, 2015
Scientific visual presentation
Oerlemans [2005]
What makes for a good scientific figure?
• Accurate• Informative• Easily understood• Appropriate for anticipated audience/medium
– What’s best for an oral or poster presentation is not necessarily ideal for a manuscript, and vice versa
– Has a natural heritage
• No fluff
ENSO pattern
GRACE estimates of ice-sheet mass loss
How do you make a good scientific figure?
• Data visualization is an extension of your scientific self• Accept that making a good figure will require numerous revisions• Good figures, liked good papers, are longer lived• Is the figure a hypothesis test or a summary of data?• Is the figure a cartoon or reality?
• Have all the data ready to be plotted beforehand• Sketch it• Plan plotting stages• Recognize its heritage and shamelessly appropriate others’ good ideas• Shamelessly re-use your own good ideas• Develop a framework that ensures repeatable figure output• Use an image editor as a last resort only
Technical approach
Philosophy
More direct advice
• There is only one font: Helvetica
• There is only one font size: bigger
• There is only one system of units: S.I.
• Plotting defaults are often poor choices
• Plan figure and axis size
• Produce raster output as a last resort only
• Use the breadth of the color palette
• Three dimensions only when absolutely necessary
Color choices good and bad
• Positive–negative changes warrant a contrasting color palette• Discretize color ranges as often as possible (e.g., cbarf)
Maintain some semblance of realism in cartoons
Useful figure features that are challenging
• Multiple subplots
• Multiple axes
• Logarithmic or non-linear color maps
• Geographically accurate maps
• Transparency
• Multiple color maps
• High-quality animations
• GUI elements
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The easiest/best things I can teach you re: Figures
• set(0, ‘DefaultFigureWindowStyle’, ‘docked’) always docks figures• set(0, ‘DefaultFigureWindowStyle’, ‘default’) always pop figures• Command–~ switch between current application’s windows• Command–tab switch between applications• epstopdf command-line conversion of eps figures to pdf• redblue red/blue color map• ‘CO_2’, ‘SO_4^{2-}’, ‘Temperature (\circC)’ simple LaTeX commands• linkaxes match multiple axes• again with the cells
Multiple subplots
• subplot(212)• subplot(‘position’, [0.08 0.05 0.90 0.44])
• Most subplots will require manual adjustment
x0 y0 w h
Multiple axes
• axes(‘position’, get(gca, ‘position’), ‘color’, ‘none’)• Set(gca, ‘yaxislocation’, ‘right’)
• line vs. plot• Avoid the hack that is plotyy
Logarithmic or non-linear color maps
• imagesc(x, y, log10(new_climate_mode), [0 1]) colorbar(‘ytick’, 0:0.5:1, ‘yticklabel’, {‘1’ ‘’ ‘10’})
• Cheat
GUI elements• Load data / assign variables• Design figure• Assign behavior, i.e., write sub-functions