On Thursday 27th July, I went along to a lecture on data visualisation. I missed out on the workshop due to it being fully subscribed but was able to attend the lecture beforehand ‘Navigating the Visualization Jungle: A 101 to the What, Why and How of Data Visualization’ by Benjamin Bach, a lecturer in ‘Design Informatics and Visualization’ at the University of Edinburgh.
I have compressed this into some interesting links and various visualisation data types Benjamin discussed.
He talked about presentation tools including RAWGraphs which is an online tool where you can upload your spreadsheet data and select how to present it. He wanted to show us the directions of visualisation rather than the solution.
Why?
It is worth taking a look at Anscombe’s Quartet if you haven’t heard of it, it shows how the same data can look quite different.
Benjamin tried a few visual tests on us which looked at pre-attentiveness and parallel processing. I found this link Perception in Visualization which has the red dot tests he used on us and more.
He showed us this interactive timeline of wealth and global health life expectancy on Gapminder.
Check out these:
What?
- Data:
- item
- attribute
- relation
- Visual marks:
- points
- lines
- areas
- Visual mapping:
- visual variables
- Data types:
- numerical
- ordered
- categorical
- Visual encoding by data type:
- quantitative
- ordinal
- nominal
How?
- 1D
- 2D
- 3D
- Multidimensional:
- scatterplot
- 3D scatterplot
- scatterplot matrix
- parallel co-ordinates
- scaling
- multiple encoding
- glyphs
- Time:
- horizon graphs
- stream graphs
- space time cube
- Sankey diagram
- history flow
- time curves
- Trees:
- hierarchy
- icicle graph
- newsmap
- Networks:
- cluster
- arc diagrams
- matrix
- time arcs
- Geographical
- Text:
- parallel tag clouds
- word tree
- word scale visualisation
Banner image copyright © Martin Grandjean, released under CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.