john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

Mailbag: Graphing software

Thu, 2012-03-08 01:01 -- John Hawks

Re: graphics

I've enjoyed reading your blog for awhile now as I like the anthropological take on genomic data. A post back in February ( http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/1000-geno... ) was accompanied by some of the more attractive bar plots I've seen (nice alpha, great fonts) -- can you divulge what software you used?

Thanks for the kind words!

These and most of my graphs are done with Mathematica. The fonts are in the PT Sans family, which are free from Google Fonts. The color scheme is stock. I composite almost all my graphs in Illustrator and in particular add nearly all the data labels that way, even though I could do them programmatically, I find it easier to just label by hand.

This post on heritability has some xy plots also from Mathematica:

http://johnhawks.net/explainer/stats/heritability-and-stature

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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.