Week 3, October 9: Visualization — Introduction

Pre-class reading

• 9 Ways to Visualize Proportions – A Guide, by Nathan Yau, 2009
• 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide, by Nathan Yau, 2010
• Design Principles for News Apps & Graphics, by Lena Groeger, 2013
• The Power of Visualization’s “Aha!” Moments, interview with Amanda Cox, 2013
• Chart Wars (video), by Alex Lundry, 2009

What we’ll cover

• Static vs. interactive visualizations.
• The elemental forms of data visualization.
• Charting tools.

Post-class assignments

• Chart these two aircraft accident datasets, plus an additional dataset of your choosing: Accidents by Airport and Accidents by Year. Use Chartbuilder and Datawrapper for at least one chart each. In a few paragraphs, describe the decisions you made and any problems you ran into.
• Browse through recent data-visualizations by any publication of your choosing. Pick one particular visualization, and write about what you find: What does it show? What works? What doesn’t?
• CodeCademy Web Fundamentals: CSS
• Optional: buy or borrow the classic treatise, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte, 1983