Overview
Overview¶
Great figures bring data to life, making communication clearer and more compelling. Bad figures can mislead and confuse, at worst they tell stories that do not exist.
Here we give tips to tell good figures from bad ones, helping improve the way you use visualisation to effectively and accurately communicate insights from data.
This module is structured as follows:
Figures Gone Wrong. Real-world for examples of bad figures, showing how easy misakes are (knowingly or unknowingly) made.
Rules of the data visualisation game. A whip-round of the basics.
Atlas of Visualisations. How visualisations are commonly adapted for different scenarios and data types.
Storytelling with data visualisation. How to ensure your figure is delivering the intended message.
Visualisation for Data Exploration. Exploring the dataset introduced in Modules 1 & 2 through visualisations.
References:
We are professional research data scientists who have spent some time plotting, but we are not experts in data visualisation. Fortunately, there are plenty of experts out there who offer excellent pedagogical material. This course is mostly based on these resources, with a sprinkling of hard-won lessons of our own.
The resources that have influenced this chapter the most is the Fundamentals of Data Visualization book by Claus O. Wilke. We also draw frequently from Andy Kirk’s visualising data site, as well as numerous others that we reference as we go.