Storytelling with Data

chapter twochoose an effective visual

Once you’ve taken time to understand the context and planned your communication in a low-tech fashion, as we practiced in Chapter 1, comes the question: when I have some data I need to show, how do I do that in an effective way? This is the topic we’ll tackle next.

There is no single “right” answer when it comes to how to visualize data. Any data can be graphed countless different ways. Often, it takes iterating—looking at the data one way, looking at it another way, and perhaps even another—to discover a view that will help us create that magical “ah ha” moment of understanding that graphs done well can do.

Speaking of iterating, we have some forthcoming exercises that will encourage you to do just that. Through the exercises in this chapter, we’ll create and evaluate a number of different types of graphs, helping us understand both the advantages and limitations of different individual pictures of the data. Our go-tos will mainly be the usual suspects—lines and bars—but we’ll look at some twists on graph types introduced in SWD as well.

Let’s practice choosing an effective visual!

First, we’ll review the main lessons from SWD Chapter 2.

Exercise 2.1: improve this table

Frequently, when we first aggregate our data, we put it into ...