Chapter 4. Visualization – Tips and Types

A journalist or blogger who uses Tableau Public must convert data to visualizations so that readers can quickly understand large quantities of data that have been distilled down to a single graphic. The role of an author is data abstraction, the conversion of real-life data into visual cues (primitives, as some people who work in the field of data science call them), such as colors, shapes, lengths, and positions. The role of your reader is to do the reverse, consume data primitives and convert them back into real-life things, events, and phenomenon. If you have done a poor job choosing the elements of your data visualization, your readers will have a difficult time relating your visualization to the real world, which means that the story that you're telling isn't as compelling as it should be. Your visualization will not have the value that you wanted, because the connection between the data visualization and the underlying data has been broken...