🌏 Data Visualization with No Code

Table of Contents

Abstract

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man an Art and Design student, in possession of a good fortune Mac, must be in want of a wife terrified of coding.

- Code and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 1870

This Unit takes students on a journey of using data to tell stories, without writing one byte of code. The tools used are also web-based and require no installation.

Datasets from various domains of human enterprise and activity are introduced. The datasets are motivated from the point of view of the Types of Information they contain: Changes, Distributions, Ranking, Relations, Space, and Time, for example.

The human contexts from these datasets are used to appreciate the specifics of data formats, and the nature of variables within the data. Student will relate the data variables to Data/Information Visualizations, making decisions on how geometric shapes and other aspects of different Data Types and Visualizations can be metaphorically matched to the contexts. These information-to-geometry metaphors will lead us to Insights, Questions, and eventually to Stories.

Students will then be prompted to work in groups, or as a whole, to conduct a complete data gathering experiment on campus, visualise the data and tell a Story that pertains to their immediate surroundings.

What you will learn

  • Data Basics: What does data look like and why should we care?
  • How to Spot a good Variable
  • What can we do with the data, visually? How do geometric attributes such as location, size, and colour, lend themselves to representing data?
  • Creating Graphs and Data Visualizations using pure web-based point-and-click software Flourish Studio](https://flourish.studio) and to create Story Board Infographics with them.
  • Rapidly make different kinds of graphs
  • Use Graphs and Tables as a way of getting answers to your Questions
  • Develop intuition that matches data and graph types
  • Learn to find data and appreciate how it was gathered in the first place
  • Tell stories with data and graphs
  • Annotate Graphs with text and insights
  • Export these to create crisp and readable documents that you can share

Introduction

Take a look at the graph visualization below:


What information does the graph convey? How ? What aspects of the Visual convey "human" information, such as Number and Relation? What could the sloping dotted line in the picture depict?

Over the next two weeks we will form our intuition about shapes and data and learn to create some evocative information graphics that tell stories.

References

  1. Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou, Hands-On Data Visualization: Interactive Storytelling from Spreadsheets to Code, https://handsondataviz.org/. Available free Online.

  2. Claus O. Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization, https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/. Available free Online.

  3. Jonathan Schwabish, *Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks, Columbia University Press, 2021.

  4. Alberto Cairo, The Functional Art:An introduction to information graphics and visualization, New Riders. 2013. ISBN-9780133041361.

  5. Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling With Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals, Wiley 2015. ISBN-9781119002253.

Quick Lookup

Charts and Data

  1. Data Vis Project https://datavizproject.com/ Allows you to match data types and data-vis types!! Perfect!!

  2. Data Viz Catalogue https://datavizcatalogue.com/ Another good place to look for graphs that match your data!

  3. From Data-to-Viz https://www.data-to-viz.com/#explore

  4. Financial Times Visual Vocabulary Chart. A great chart to match data to data-viz. PDF here and Web version https://ft-interactive.github.io/visual-vocabulary/

  5. 72 types of Visualization for Data Stories https://blog.gramener.com/types-of-data-visualization-for-data-stories/

Charting in R

  1. R Charts https://r-charts.com/

  2. R Graph Gallery https://r-graph-gallery.com/index.html

Dataset Resources

  1. A wide variety of graphics and datasets on global issues at Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/

  2. Datasets at calmcode.io https://calmcode.io/datasets.html. Simple datasets that you should begin with.

  3. Data.World https://data.world. A very well organized easily searchable database of datasets and visualizations!

  4. The Harvard Dataverse https://dataverse.harvard.edu/. A very large searchable database of datasets on a very wode set of topics.

  5. IPUMS https://www.ipums.org/ Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) is the world’s largest individual-level population database. IPUMS consists of microdata samples from United States (IPUMS-USA) and international (IPUMS-International) census records, as well as data from U.S. and international surveys. Data provided is integrated across time and space.Health, Economics, Higher Education, Historical Data and much more

  6. Kaggle Datasets https://www.kaggle.com/datasets E.g. Netflix Shows

  7. Data Is Plural https://www.data-is-plural.com/. This a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets by Jeremy Singer-Vine.

  8. Information is Beautiful https://informationisbeautiful.net/ David McCandless' terrific information visualization site. All datasets used here are also available for download.

  9. India Data by Sector https://data.gov.in/sector

  10. The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer (very US-centric) https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home

  11. Datasets at 538 ( very US-centric) https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/

  12. Open Data Network ( again very US-centric) https://www.opendatanetwork.com/

  13. 311-data.org https://www.311-data.org/. Data about 311 calls in different parts of the US. (#311 is a complaints service that deals with non-crime / non-emergency related neighbourhood issues in the US)

  14. Google Dataset Search https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/

  15. Github dataset search https://github.com/search?q=datasets

  16. World Inequality Database, https://wid.world/. Global data on income and wealth inequality. India specific data also available.

  17. World Bank Open Data https://data.worldbank.org/. A global collection of economic development data .

  18. Jonathan Schwabish’s PolicyViz DataViz Catalogue. https://policyviz.com/resources/policyviz-data-visualization-catalog/ This is a spreadsheet that has links to data and images of visualizations that have been achieved with each of the datasets. Over 800 entries…see table below! (US centric, but very inspirational visualizations!), See the emebedded version below:

Our Tools

Chart Creation and Export

  1. Orange Data Mining https://orangedatamining.com/ Free software. Very intuitive, point-and-click, goes all the way from simple data-viz to ML!

  2. Datawrapper Academy https://academy.datawrapper.de/ A free browser-based tool, requires registration and login.

  3. RAWGraphs https://app.rawgraphs.io/ Another Free browser-based tool, no registration, no login. Simple interface too.

Story Telling with Charts

  1. Flourish Studio https://flourish.studio/ Beautiful and easy data visualization and storytelling

  2. Infogram https://infogram.com/ Create engaging infographics and reports in minutes

  3. Visme https://www.visme.co/ Yet another…

Modules

No Code No Software

Last updated on Jan 7, 2024