Data Communication and Visualisation
Articles
A Data Scientist’s Real Job: Storytelling, Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin (Harvard Business Review Mar 2013)
The article outlines the importance and tips on how to translate data and information into smart decisions. The author describes how they “humanize” data into a story about performance. “Data gives you the
what, but humans need to know
why”.
10 Kinds of Stories to Tell with Data, Tom Davenport (Harvard Business Review May 2014)
Highlights the importance of narrative in communication along with visual analytics and delves into four key dimensions to consider: time, focus, depth and methods.
Data scientists to CEOs: You can’t handle the truth, Bill Franks (Venture Beat Aug 2015)
Explains the impact of workplace culture resulting in a tendency for insights to get rosier as the message travel up from data scientist to CEO. Outlines the importance of executives being open to consider all assumptions and risks in a data scientist’s message to ensure negative insights are not swept under the carpet.
Audio and Video
David McCandless: Information is Beautiful
David McCandless goes through some examples of information which appear high level and uses visualisation, ‘patterns and connections’ to relate back to the individual
The Future of Data Visualisation – Jeffrey Heer (Strata + Hadoop 2015)
Jeffrey Heer talks about techniques to consider when visualising data (e.g. consider visual perceptions) to allow for optimal analysis and decision making
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Aaron Koblin: Artfully visualizing our humanity
Aaron talks about the ‘interface’ – talks through and shows the interfaces of some interesting data projects
Tools and Resources
Information is beautiful
Dedicated to distilling the world's data, information and knowledge into beautiful, interesting and, above all, useful visualizations, infographics and diagrams.
Information is beautiful awards - 2015 The Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards celebrate excellence and beauty in data visualizations and infographics.
FlowingData.com
FlowingData explores how statisticians, designers, data scientists, and others use analysis, visualization, and exploration to understand data and ourselves.
Visualisingdata.com
Visualisingdata.com is an award-winning site providing readers with a rich variety of content that charts the development of the data visualisation field.
Data visualisations at the Guardian
This is a link to the Guardian’s collection of articles related to data visualisation, ordered chronologically.
VisualComplexity.com
VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.
Vizualize.tumblr.com
This blog about visualization has an eclectic collection of visualisations.
Feltron.com + Feltron.tumblrcom
Nicholas Felton is a designer, entrepreneur and artist whose work focuses on translating quotidian data into meaningful objects and experiences.
R: The R Project for Statistical Computing
R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing
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D3.js
D3.js is a JavaScript library that uses HTML, SVG, and CSS to render diagrams and charts from a variety of data sources.
Tableau
Tableau public is a popular data visualization tool that's also completely free.
Raw
Open, customizable, and free to download and modify, Raw lets users create vector-based data visualizations.
Plot.ly
Make charts and dashboards online from CSV or Excel data. Create interactive D3.js charts, reports, and dashboards online. API clients for R and Python.
Highcharts
Highcharts is a JavaScript charting library with a huge range of chart options available. The output is rendered using SVG in modern browsers and VML in Internet Explorer.
Datawrapper
Datawrapper is an open source tool helping everyone to create simple, correct and embeddable charts in minutes.
Quadrigram
Quadrigram is an online visualization data tool
Google Charts
Google Charts is highly flexible and has an excellent set of developer tools behind it. It's an especially useful tool for specialist visualizations such as geocharts and gauges, and it also includes built-in animation and user interaction controls.