Better Living Through Graphs
Wright Seneres
Trustee, Rider University | Multimedia designer and digital content producer
Learnings from my Data Visualization course, Part 1
I just completed the Data and Text Visualization course as part of the master’s program in information design and strategy that I am in at Northwestern. Some learnings:
I have a much better understanding of when to use certain types of visualizations as opposed to others. For example, the nuances of using line graphs versus bar graphs was something I only had a cursory knowledge of, so that was good to learn in depth.
I had also never really considered the limited effectiveness of pie charts, so for nothing else, that was an important takeaway for me. I will stick to the baked good variety.
Our main text was Stephen Few’s Now You See It. It was an excellent overview of the concepts underlying effective visualizations. You know it’s a good book when even ten years after its publication, it’s still relevant and spot-on.
Last quarter I took a predictive analytics course, and this data visualization course was a good pairing. One takeaway from that course was to be mindful of bias in data, which was good to carry through this data visualization course. Conveying a message with a data visualization has its own biases, so not losing sight of that is always important. Accessibility in crafting visualizations is something else to be mindful of in this vein.
Implementing good design practices (colors, typographic choices, etc.) is also vital in data visualization, especially of the interactive visualization. It was good to have that prior knowledge going in.
I have a lot to learn still. I was glad to use Tableau more. It was good to get a little practice in D3.js, R and RStudio, and Gephi. I wish I had known more R or Python going in. I’m excited to further explore resources like data.world and Kaggle and get inspired by examples at bl.ocks.org. I’m looking forward to new stuff I didn’t get to try like Onodo, Exploratory, and Observable.
I’m very excited to bring these concepts and new skills to my work at the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. Look for more visualizations from PEC in the coming months!
Here are a couple of class projects on my public.tableau.com profile.
(They're...works in progress. Like demo tapes!)
Tomorrow, Part 2!
Vice President, End User Services at Arch Capital Group
5 年Awesome job Wright!
Greetings, Sir. Are you familiar with the Central Jersey Tableau User's Group. Of interest for data viz and not just Tableau folk. I can forward you info if you want. Go Birds.
Great post Wright! This course was very informative and I enjoyed learning about creating interactive visualizations. I hope to implement the skills that we learned in this course in my career. I just wish our professor would expedite the grading of our assignments and discussions! Best wishes on completing the rest of the Master’s program.
Growth Strategist/Sustainability Investor
5 年Kudos to you, Wright! I can’t wait to see how you’ll end up putting your learnings to good use at PEC. Stephen Few is actually not a fan of pie charts, as he reminded to me personally after a presentation. I like pies for categorization representation augmented with hover overs.