Visual Analytics Fundamentals


Book Description

Master the Fundamentals of Modern Visual Analytics--and Craft Compelling Visual Narratives in Tableau! Do you need to persuade or inform people? Do you have data? Then you need to master visual analytics and visual storytelling. Today, the #1 tool for telling visual stories with data is Tableau, and demand for Tableau skills is soaring. In Visual Analytics Fundamentals, renowned visual storyteller and analytics professor Lindy Ryan introduces all the fundamental visual analytics knowledge, cognitive and perceptual concepts, and hands-on Tableau techniques you'll need. Ryan puts core analytics and visual concepts upfront, so you'll always know exactly what you're trying to accomplish and can apply this knowledge with any tool. Building on this foundation, she presents classroom-proven guided exercises for translating ideas into reality with Tableau 2022. You'll learn how to organize data and structure analysis with stories in mind, embrace exploration and visual discovery, and articulate your findings with rich data, well-curated visualizations, and skillfully crafted narrative frameworks. Ryan's insider tips take you far beyond the basics--and you'll rely on her expert checklists for years to come. Communicate more powerfully by applying scientific knowledge of the human brain Get started with the Tableau platform and Tableau Desktop 2022 Connect data and quickly prepare it for analysis Ask questions that help you keep data firmly in context Choose the right charts, graphs, and maps for each project--and avoid the wrong ones Craft storyboards that reflect your message and audience Direct attention to what matters most Build data dashboards that guide people towards meaningful outcomes Master advanced visualizations, including timelines, Likert scales, and lollipop charts This book has only one prerequisite: your desire to communicate insights from data in ways that are memorable and actionable. It's for executives and professionals sharing important results, students writing reports or presentations, teachers cultivating data literacy, journalists making sense of complex trends. . . . practically everyone! Don't even have Tableau? Download your free trial of Tableau Desktop and let's get started!




Visual Analytics with Tableau


Book Description

A four-color journey through a complete Tableau visualization Tableau is a popular data visualization tool that’s easy for individual desktop use as well as enterprise. Used by financial analysts, marketers, statisticians, business and sales leadership, and many other job roles to present data visually for easy understanding, it’s no surprise that Tableau is an essential tool in our data-driven economy. Visual Analytics with Tableau is a complete journey in Tableau visualization for a non-technical business user. You can start from zero, connect your first data, and get right into creating and publishing awesome visualizations and insightful dashboards. • Learn the different types of charts you can create • Use aggregation, calculated fields, and parameters • Create insightful maps • Share interactive dashboards Geared toward beginners looking to get their feet wet with Tableau, this book makes it easy and approachable to get started right away.




Visual Data Storytelling with Tableau


Book Description

Tell Insightful, Actionable Business Stories with Tableau, the World’s Leading Data Visualization Tool! Visual Data Storytelling with Tableau brings together knowledge, context, and hands-on skills for telling powerful, actionable data stories with Tableau. This full-color guide shows how to organize data and structure analysis with storytelling in mind, embrace exploration and visual discovery, and articulate findings with rich data, carefully curated visualizations, and skillfully crafted narrative. You don’t need any visualization experience. Each chapter illuminates key aspects of design practice and data visualization, and guides you step-by-step through applying them in Tableau. Through realistic examples and classroom-tested exercises, Professor Lindy Ryan helps you use Tableau to analyze data, visualize it, and help people connect more intuitively and emotionally with it. Whether you’re an analyst, executive, student, instructor, or journalist, you won’t just master the tools: you’ll learn to craft data stories that make an immediate impact--and inspire action. Learn how to: • Craft more powerful stories by blending data science, genre, and visual design • Ask the right questions upfront to plan data collection and analysis • Build storyboards and choose charts based on your message and audience • Direct audience attention to the points that matter most • Showcase your data stories in high-impact presentations • Integrate Tableau storytelling throughout your business communication • Explore case studies that show what to do--and what not to do • Discover visualization best practices, tricks, and hacks you can use with any tool • Includes coverage up through Tableau 10







Fundamentals of Data Visualization


Book Description

Effective visualization is the best way to communicate information from the increasingly large and complex datasets in the natural and social sciences. But with the increasing power of visualization software today, scientists, engineers, and business analysts often have to navigate a bewildering array of visualization choices and options. This practical book takes you through many commonly encountered visualization problems, and it provides guidelines on how to turn large datasets into clear and compelling figures. What visualization type is best for the story you want to tell? How do you make informative figures that are visually pleasing? Author Claus O. Wilke teaches you the elements most critical to successful data visualization. Explore the basic concepts of color as a tool to highlight, distinguish, or represent a value Understand the importance of redundant coding to ensure you provide key information in multiple ways Use the book’s visualizations directory, a graphical guide to commonly used types of data visualizations Get extensive examples of good and bad figures Learn how to use figures in a document or report and how employ them effectively to tell a compelling story




Visualization Analysis and Design


Book Description

Learn How to Design Effective Visualization SystemsVisualization Analysis and Design provides a systematic, comprehensive framework for thinking about visualization in terms of principles and design choices. The book features a unified approach encompassing information visualization techniques for abstract data, scientific visualization techniques




Storytelling with Data


Book Description

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!




Data Visualization Made Simple


Book Description

Data Visualization Made Simple is a practical guide to the fundamentals, strategies, and real-world cases for data visualization, an essential skill required in today’s information-rich world. With foundations rooted in statistics, psychology, and computer science, data visualization offers practitioners in almost every field a coherent way to share findings from original research, big data, learning analytics, and more. In nine appealing chapters, the book: examines the role of data graphics in decision-making, sharing information, sparking discussions, and inspiring future research; scrutinizes data graphics, deliberates on the messages they convey, and looks at options for design visualization; and includes cases and interviews to provide a contemporary view of how data graphics are used by professionals across industries Both novices and seasoned designers in education, business, and other areas can use this book’s effective, linear process to develop data visualization literacy and promote exploratory, inquiry-based approaches to visualization problems.




Data Visualization


Book Description

An accessible primer on how to create effective graphics from data This book provides students and researchers a hands-on introduction to the principles and practice of data visualization. It explains what makes some graphs succeed while others fail, how to make high-quality figures from data using powerful and reproducible methods, and how to think about data visualization in an honest and effective way. Data Visualization builds the reader’s expertise in ggplot2, a versatile visualization library for the R programming language. Through a series of worked examples, this accessible primer then demonstrates how to create plots piece by piece, beginning with summaries of single variables and moving on to more complex graphics. Topics include plotting continuous and categorical variables; layering information on graphics; producing effective “small multiple” plots; grouping, summarizing, and transforming data for plotting; creating maps; working with the output of statistical models; and refining plots to make them more comprehensible. Effective graphics are essential to communicating ideas and a great way to better understand data. This book provides the practical skills students and practitioners need to visualize quantitative data and get the most out of their research findings. Provides hands-on instruction using R and ggplot2 Shows how the “tidyverse” of data analysis tools makes working with R easier and more consistent Includes a library of data sets, code, and functions




Interactive Visual Data Analysis


Book Description

In the age of big data, being able to make sense of data is an important key to success. Interactive Visual Data Analysis advocates the synthesis of visualization, interaction, and automatic computation to facilitate insight generation and knowledge crystallization from large and complex data. The book provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of visual, interactive, and analytical methods. It introduces criteria for designing interactive visual data analysis solutions, discusses factors influencing the design, and examines the involved processes. The reader is made familiar with the basics of visual encoding and gets to know numerous visualization techniques for multivariate data, temporal data, geo-spatial data, and graph data. A dedicated chapter introduces general concepts for interacting with visualizations and illustrates how modern interaction technology can facilitate the visual data analysis in many ways. Addressing today’s large and complex data, the book covers relevant automatic analytical computations to support the visual data analysis. The book also sheds light on advanced concepts for visualization in multi-display environments, user guidance during the data analysis, and progressive visual data analysis. The authors present a top-down perspective on interactive visual data analysis with a focus on concise and clean terminology. Many real-world examples and rich illustrations make the book accessible to a broad interdisciplinary audience from students, to experts in the field, to practitioners in data-intensive application domains. Features: Dedicated to the synthesis of visual, interactive, and analysis methods Systematic top-down view on visualization, interaction, and automatic analysis Broad coverage of fundamental and advanced visualization techniques Comprehensive chapter on interacting with visual representations Extensive integration of automatic computational methods Accessible portrayal of cutting-edge visual analytics technology Foreword by Jack van Wijk For more information, you can also visit the author website, where the book's figures are made available under the CC BY Open Access license.