Danyel Fisher - Making Data Visual: A Practical Guide to Using Visualization for Insight

by Danyel Fisher and Miriah Meyer

Copyright 2018 Miriah Meyer, Microsoft. All rights reserved.

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• January 2018: First Edition

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Visualization is a vital tool for understanding and sharing insights around data. The right visualization can help express a core idea or open a space to examination; it can get the world talking about a dataset or sharing an insight .

Figure P-1. Visualizations can take many forms, from views that support exploratory analysis (top left), to those that provide quick overviews in a dashboard (bottom), to an infographic about popular topics (top right).

Visualizations provide a direct and tangible representation of data. They allow people to confirm hypotheses and gain insights. When incorporated into the data analysis process early and often, visualizations can even fundamentally alter the questions that someone is asking.

Creating effective visualizations is hard. Not because a dataset requires an exotic and bespoke visual representationfor many problems, standard statistical charts will suffice. And not because creating a visualization requires coding expertise in an unfamiliar programming languageoff-the-shelf tools like Excel, Tableau, and R are ample enough to suffice.

Rather, creating effective visualizations is difficult because the problems that are best addressed by visualization are often complex and ill-formed. The task of figuring out what attributes of a dataset are important is often conflated with figuring out what type of visualization to use. Picking a chart type to represent specific attributes in a dataset is comparatively easy. Deciding on which data attributes will help answer a question, however, is a complex, poorly defined, and user-driven process that can require several rounds of visualization and exploration to resolve. In this book, we focus on the process of going from high-level questions to well-defined data analysis tasks, and on how to incorporate visualizations along the way to clarify understanding and gain insights.