Visualize This, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Data is everywhere, and one of the best ways to explore a dataset is with visualization. Place the numbers into a visual space and let your brain find the patterns. We're good at that. Discover insights that you wouldn't see in a spreadsheet alone. From here, you can use visualization to communicate to others, from an audience of one to millions.

For a long while, visualization was more of a quantitative and technical exercise. Show data, get out of the way, and let the data speak. This approach works sometimes, but it assumes that data speaks a language that everyone understands and that it always speaks definitively and in absolutes. However, data is not always so straightforward, and the insights are often not so certain.

Over the past 17 years of writing for FlowingData, a site on visualization, statistics, and design, I've seen an evolution. Visualization was mostly an analysis tool when I started my studies but it has developed into a medium to tell stories with data. You can show just the facts, but you can also evoke emotion, entertain, and compel change.

In my own work, visualization is a way to understand data, share what I find, and, most importantly, make sense of what's going on around me. I follow an iterative process of answering questions with data, visualizing the answers, and then asking more questions. Repeat until there are no more questions. While the general analysis and visualization process remained about the same since the first edition ...