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)

What Relationships to Look For

So far you looked at basic relationships with patterns in time and proportions. You learned about temporal trends, and compared proportions and percentages to see what’s the least and greatest and everything in between. The next step is to look for relationships between different variables. As something goes up, does another thing go down, and is it a causal or correlative relationship? The former is usually quite hard to prove quantitatively, which makes it even less likely you can prove it with a graphic. You can, however, easily show correlation, which can lead to a deeper more exploratory analysis.

You can also take a step back to look at the big picture, or the distribution of your data. Is it actually spaced out or is it clustered in between? Such comparisons can lead to stories about citizens of a country or how you compare to those around you. You can see how different countries compare to one another or general developmental can progress...