Session 1_1. What is Data Visualization

Questions

What is data visualization?
Why data visualization?
What is dashboard?

Learning Objectives

Know advantages and disadvantages of data visualization
Understand the importance of data visualization
Familiarize with the examples of data visualization
Understand what main characteristics of dashboards

What is data visualization?

Data visualization is the graphical representation of information and data.

Advantage and disadvantages of data visualization

Advantages

Can identify information that’s hard to see in table, such as trends and outliers
Easily share information
Interactively explore data
Easy to understand patterns and relationships in data

Disadvantages

Visualization with many different data points can lead an inaccurate assumption.
Wrong design of visualization can be biased or confusing
Display biased or inaccurate information
Correlation doesn’t always mean causation
Core message can get lost in translation

Major types of visualizations

There are a lot of visualization methods and below are three widely used options.

Charts display data in graphs, plots, and diagrams, organized along two axes. The horizontal line is the x-axis, and the y-axis is the vertical line.

Geospatial visualizations display data in map form, using colors, shapes, and other visual elements to show the relationship between location and data.

Tables display data in rows and columns as you’ve likely encountered in a spreadsheet. They represent exact numbers and categories.

What is Dashboard?

Dashboard is a collection of visualizations and data displayed in one place to help with analyzing and presenting data.

Even though infographic, a combination of visuals and words that represent data, is not a focus of this course, I put the table comparing those two to help you understand what dashboard is.

	Data Visuaslization	Infographics
Complexity	Vary greatly in complexity, from simple bar charts to highly complex scientific visualizations	Generally quite simple, targeting a layman audience
Includes narrative or storytelling	No (this is external to the visualization)	Usually
Design and aesthetics	Often automatically generated - if published or used in presentations, more attention is paid to the design.	Often a lot of work goes into the design and making it aesthetically pleasing
Includes meta data (e.g. units, source, definitions)	Generally considered to be external to the data visualization (and often excluded)	Sometimes
Interactive	Increasingly so in web-based data visualizations	Rarely, infographics are normally static images

Examples

Public Health Dashboards
- https://www.cdc.gov/nssp/using-dashboards-to-present-nssp-data.html
- https://dsripdashboards.health.ny.gov/

Public Health Infographics
- https://www.apha.org/news-and-media/multimedia/infographics
- https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/infographics/default.html

Summary

Data visualization is an efficient way to deliver information and there are many methods and tools available. You should understand advantages and disadvantages of data visualization to use it appropriately.

Reference
https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/data-visualization#tools-software
https://www.tableau.com/data-insights/reference-library/visual-analytics