Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics

Wrapping Up

Looking for relationships in your data can be challenging at times and requires more critical thinking than blindly graphing numbers, but it can also be the most rewarding and informative. It’s how your data, or rather, how the things that your data represents relate and interact with each other that’s interesting—that’s what makes for the best stories.

This chapter covered how to look for correlations between multiple variables, but explained relationships in a more general sense, too. Look at how everything relates to each other as a whole through distributions. Look within the distributions for outliers or patterns, and then think about the context of what you see. Then if you find something interesting, ask why. Think about the context of the data and possible explanations.

This is the best part about playing with data because you get to explore what the data is about and maybe dig up something interesting. Then when you dig enough, you can explain to readers what you find. Remember, not everyone speaks the language of numbers, so keep it at a human level for the general audience. Don’t be afraid to turn it up to nerd level though, if you have the right audience.