About

Welcome to Visual Science! A place to find and share beautiful and informative content relating to data visualization, with a focus on the science of human perception, visualizing scientific data, and statistical charts.

I’m Danielle Callan and I can’t decide which I love more, scientific data or data visualization. Fortunately, I think I may not have to choose. At least, that’s my hope in Visual Science.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. I began my journey unable to choose between Biology and Computer Science, and settled on Bioinformatics. I received two degrees in Bioinformatics from Rutgers University, and started work at RUCDR Infinite Biologics as a Bioinformatician. I later found my way to the VEuPathDB project at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am now. That’s where I first met data visualization, and fell in love with statistical charts.

I think at first I was asked to make statistical charts for the project because I was handy with R, and they were using tools like ggplot2 and Shiny at the time. I decided if I was going to spend a decent amount of time making plots, I may as well know something about them. I bought a few books (another love of mine) and haven’t been able to stop reading since.

I’ve learned a lot. I’ve contributed to a lot of in-house plotting solutions. I have a lot of opinions and ideas. I want to share some of what I’ve learned, and stretch my legs a bit more… and so enters Visual Science! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.