A quick guide to Data Visualization
Posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2014 by ATC in Industry News with No Comments
A picture is worth a thousand words, that’s what you need to know to grasp what data visualization is. Data visualization is showing information using graphic methods. This will help the readers to better understand the information without a longer explanation.
There are unlimited ways to do so, but we will cover five of the most common and useful ways:
Bar Graph: One of the most common and classical ways to show information, the bar graph uses bars to compare two or more information stances, for example, to show how many people eat vanilla and chocolate ice cream. We would use a bar for vanilla and another one for chocolate.
Circle graph: It uses a circle to represent a total, and slices with different colors to represent different characteristics, for example, we can have a circle for the internet usage, and different slices would be “Social networks”, “business”, and “games”.
Time-Line: A linear graph that shows different events in a line of time, to show the distance between an event and another, for example, the foundation of Rome, and the death of Caesar
Geographical graphs: Used to show distribution of information in the maps, using different colors for different data in the map, for example, using red for cities with more than 1 million population and green for cities with less than that.
Symbolic: Besides the data graphs, there are other ways to show information, pictures, drawings, creative ways to do it. For example, “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso is a painting that has in it a lot of information, including the social and political situation of his country.
Those methods are simple to use, but hard to master. You have to use your own creativity to think of the best way to show your information.
The data visualization is only one of the areas covered by data journalism. Data Journalism is a journalism based on data-driven journalism, where journalists make use of databases to produce stories, using statistic information and any other numerical information to create articles.
In order to explore data journalism, you need to follow a few steps:
Select the information to use: First of all, you have to look for the information that you want to put in an article, look for the data and select the relevant things for you.
Select the way to show it: From the options in the first part of the article, you have to make a selection based in the kind of information you have.
Analyze the information: In order to explain something, you need to understand it first, so everyone can learn it from you.
Transform the information: One of the last steps, you need to transform the data that is in words and numbers, to some kind of visual way to show it, the one selected in the second step, trying to be as clear as possible.
Organize everything: After everything is done, you have to set up your article based on the information selected, and using the data visualization as a tool to help you.
After all of this is done, you’ll be doing your first steps in data journalism, good luck.
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