Hands-On Data Visualization

Introduction

Why Data Visualization?

In this book, you’ll learn how to create true and meaningful data visualizations through chapters that blend design principles and step-by-step tutorials to make your information-based analysis and arguments more insightful and compelling. Just as sentences become more persuasive with supporting evidence and source notes, your data-driven writing becomes more powerful when paired with appropriate tables, charts, or maps. Words tell us stories, but visualizations show us data stories by transforming quantitative, relational, or spatial patterns into images. When visualizations are well-designed, they draw our attention to what is most important in the data in ways that would be difficult to communicate through text alone.

Our book features a growing number of free and easy-to-learn digital tools for creating data visualizations. We broadly define this term primarily as charts, which encode data as images, and maps, which add a spatial dimension. While tables do not illustrate data in the same way, we include them in this book because of our pragmatic need to direct new learners through a decision-making process that often results in building one of these three products. Furthermore, in this digital era we define data visualizations as images that can be easily reused by modifying the underlying information, typically stored in a data file, in contrast to infographics that are generally designed as single-use artwork.¹

As educators, we designed ...