Data Visualization

Catalog description

This course is an introduction to the principles and techniques for visualizing data. This course shows you how to better understand your data, present clear evidence of your findings to your intended audience, and tell engaging data stories that clearly depict the points you want to make all through data graphics. You will learn visual representation methods and techniques that increase your understanding of complex data and models. Emphasis is placed on the identification of patterns, trends, and differences from data sets across categories, space, and time. The ways that humans process and encode visual and textual information will be discussed in relation to selecting the appropriate method for the display of quantitative and qualitative data. Graphical methods for specialized data types (times series, categorical, etc.) are presented. Topics include charts, tables, graphics, effective presentations, multimedia content, animation, and dashboard design. Throughout the course, several questions will drive the design of data visualizations. These include: Who’s the audience? What’s the data? What’s the task? What’s the best visual display? This is a hands-on course. In this course, we will focus on Tableau and Excel to create, edit, alter, and display your data graphics. To learn these tools, we will begin working with some very small data sets to practice and then advance to larger data sets. Since this is not a class on data analysis or models, you’ll be expected to apply your prior knowledge of statistics, data mining, and data science to the creation of beautiful data displays (using big or small data).