Information Visualization

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Slide Deck | ​Lecture | Lecture Notes | Guest Lectures | Discussions | Self-Assessment | Diary

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This lesson addresses the key concepts in explanatory information visualization. It shows how to construct useful visualizations that communicate insight and allow for decision making. The lesson explains how to properly use color, pre-attentive attributes, and whitespace. It demonstrates how to construct common charts and graphs in Excel.

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Objective

Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to

• define explanatory versus exploratory information visualization
• apply best practices to create compelling explanatory visualizations
• use Excel to create visualizations

Required Lessons

Read the blog by Cole Nussbaumer to see how the charts are produced in Excel. For example, here're step-by-step instructions for chart "How people get their news" shown in the video lesson.

Required Readings

• Data 101: A Refresher Course by Katie French, visage.co​

Optional Lessons

Suggested Readings

• Storytelling with Data: Blogs
  
• Principles of Data Visualization
• Chart Types & Graphs for Information Visualization
• Kennedy, Jesse. Principles of Information Visualization - Part 1: Design Principles

Suggested Readings on ggplot

• Grolemund, R., Wickham, H., (2018). R for Data Science. Chapter 3: Data Visualization. O'Reilly.
• Prabhakaran, S. How to make any plot in ggplot2
• Prabhakaran, S. The Complete ggplot2 Tutorial