Data visualization is the process of transforming data into visual forms that can help you communicate your message, insights, or findings to your audience.
Data visualization can enhance your data analysis, storytelling, and decision-making by making your data more understandable, engaging, and persuasive.
However, data visualization is not just about presenting data. It is also about exploring data, discovering data, and learning from data.
Data visualization can help you uncover insights that may not be visible or obvious from looking at numbers or tables.
Data visualization can help you visualize the invisible, and reveal the hidden patterns, trends, outliers, and relationships in your data.
In this article, we will share some of the ways that data visualization can help you uncover insights through data visualization, and how they can help you improve your layout engineering and design skills.
Exploring Data with Interactive Visualizations
One of the ways that data visualization can help you uncover insights is by allowing you to explore data with interactive visualizations.
Interactive visualizations are data visualizations that enable you to manipulate, filter, zoom, or drill down into your data, and see how your data changes or responds to your actions.
Interactive visualizations can help you explore data in a dynamic and flexible way, and find the most relevant and interesting information for your purpose.
Some of the benefits of exploring data with interactive visualizations are:
- You can control the level of detail and granularity of your data, and focus on the aspects that matter most to you.
- You can compare and contrast different scenarios, perspectives, or hypotheses, and see how they affect your data and your message.
- You can test and validate your assumptions, questions, or findings, and see if they are supported or contradicted by your data.
- You can discover new or unexpected insights, and generate new or refined questions or hypotheses.
Some of the tools that you can use to create and explore data with interactive visualizations are:
- Tableau, a powerful and popular data visualization tool that allows you to create and share interactive dashboards, charts, maps, and more.
- Power BI, a business intelligence platform that allows you to connect, analyze, and visualize data from various sources, and create and share interactive reports and dashboards.
- Datawrapper, a simple and easy-to-use data visualization tool that allows you to create and share interactive charts, maps, and tables.
Discovering Data with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Another way that data visualization can help you uncover insights is by using machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover data.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are technologies that enable computers to learn from data, and perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as classification, prediction, recommendation, or generation.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence can help you discover data that may not be accessible or available to you, or that may be too complex or large for you to analyze manually.
Some of the benefits of discovering data with machine learning and artificial intelligence are:
- You can access and leverage data from various sources, such as web, social media, sensors, or images, and enrich your data and your analysis.
- You can automate and optimize your data analysis, and save time and resources.
- You can uncover hidden or latent patterns, trends, outliers, and relationships in your data, and gain deeper and broader insights.
- You can generate new or novel data, and create new or innovative visualizations.
Some of the tools that you can use to discover data with machine learning and artificial intelligence are:
- Google Cloud AI Platform, a cloud-based platform that allows you to build, deploy, and manage machine learning and artificial intelligence models and applications.
- IBM Watson Studio, a cloud-based platform that allows you to build, train, and deploy machine learning and artificial intelligence models and applications.
- Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, a cloud-based platform that allows you to build, train, and deploy machine learning and artificial intelligence models and applications.
Learning from Data with Data Stories and Data Literacy
The third and final way that data visualization can help you uncover insights is by helping you learn from data with data stories and data literacy.
Data stories are narratives that use data and visualizations to tell a compelling and meaningful story about your data, and persuade your audience to take action or make decisions.
Data literacy is the ability to read, understand, analyze, and communicate data effectively.
Data stories and data literacy can help you learn from data, and improve your data visualization skills and outcomes.
Some of the benefits of learning from data with data stories and data literacy are:
- You can communicate your data and your message in a clear and engaging way, and capture and hold your audience’s attention.
- You can influence your audience’s emotions, imagination, and curiosity, and make your data more memorable and impactful.
- You can inspire and motivate your audience to take action or make decisions, and achieve your goal or objective.
- You can improve your data visualization skills, and become a more confident and competent data communicator.
Some of the resources that you can use to learn from data with data stories and data literacy are:
- Storytelling with Data, a blog and a book that teach you how to create and deliver effective data stories, and provide examples and tips.
- Data Literacy Project, a community and a platform that provide resources and courses to help you learn and improve your data literacy skills.
- DataCamp, an online learning platform that offers courses and projects on data visualization, data analysis, and data science.
Data visualization is a skill that can help you communicate your data and your message in a clear and effective way.
However, data visualization is also a process that can help you uncover insights that may not be visible or obvious from looking at numbers or tables.
Data visualization can help you visualize the invisible, and reveal the hidden patterns, trends, outliers, and relationships in your data.
In this article, we have shared some of the ways that data visualization can help you uncover insights, and how they can help you improve your layout engineering and design skills.
We hope you have learned something new and useful, and we encourage you to experiment and apply these ways to your own data visualization projects.