Book Image

Visualize This

By : Nathan Yau‚ÄØ
Book Image

Visualize This

By: Nathan Yau‚ÄØ

Overview of this book

Visualize This is a guide on how to visualize and tell stories with data, providing practical design tips complemented with step-by-step tutorials. It begins with a description of the huge growth of data and visualization in industry, news, and gov't and opportunities for those who tell stories with data. Logically it moves on to actual stories in data-statistical ones with trends and human stories. the technical part comes up quickly with how to gather, parse and format data with Python, R, Excel, Google docs, and so on, and details tools to visualize data-native graphics for the Web like ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML. Every chapter provides an example as well. Patterns over time and kinds of data charts are followed by proportions, chart types and examples. Next, examples and descriptions of outliers and how to show them, different kinds of maps, how to guide your readers and explain the data "in the visualization". The book ends with a value-add appendix on graphical perception.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Chapter 6

Visualizing Relationships

Statistics is about finding relationships in data. What are the similarities between groups? Within groups? Within subgroups? The relationship that most people are familiar with for statistics is correlation. For example, as average height goes up in a population, most likely average weight will go up, too. This is a simple positive correlation. The relationships in your data, just like in real life, can get more complicated though as you consider more factors or find patterns that aren’t so linear. This chapter discusses how to use visualization to find such relationships and highlight them for storytelling.

As you get into more complex statistical graphics, you can make heavy use of R in this chapter and the next. This is where the open-source software shines. Like in previous chapters, R does the grunt work, and then you can use Illustrator to make the graphic more readable for an audience.