3. WAY
MORE COMPLEX
"By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you
can explore with your eyes, a sort of information map. And when
you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful."
-David McCandless, author, data journalist, information
designer.
4. "The greatest value of a picture is when it forces
us to notice what we never expected to see."
-John Tukey
5. "When information was scarce, most of our efforts were devoted
to hunting and gathering. Now that information is abundant,
processing is more important."
-Phillip Meyer, journalist and professor at UNC, Chapel Hill
6. Uses• Get a bird's eye view of "Big Data" information overload
• Discover hidden insights
• Highlight outliers visually
• Understand patterns and trends instantly and visually
7. Characteristics... of data viz
• Data itself is the story; standalone narrative (often coupled
w/ text).
• Interactive, communicative, visual.
• Ranges from simple (charts) to complex (database-driven
applications).
• Both a technique and a format.
8. Infographics ≠
data visualization
Have different connotations
(Although many, including Alberto Cairo, information design
legend, defend the term 'infographic' in its original sense)
13. Brief history
•Grew out of CAR (computer assisted-
reporting) tradition
•First major modern use: John
Snow’s 1854 cholera map (right)
•Has coincided with the era of “Big
Data”
14.
15.
16. "There's a strand of the data viz world that argues that everything
could be a bar chart. That's possibly true but also possibly a world
without joy."
-Amanda Cox, New York Times
17.
18. "Data journalism is the
new punk. Anyone can do
it."
-Simon Rogers, The
Guardian
28. Just a few of dozens of tools to
democratize data visualization.
See Edmodo
and links for exhaustive resource list.
29. Steps for any data viz project:
1. Research - Think of topic and research factors.
2. Find - Locate and/or obtain/scrape the data.
3. Analyze - Clean errors, evaluate what data says, crunch
numbers,look for trends/inconsistencies.
4. Visualize - Display data in manner most appropriate to
nature of story/format of information.