These are a few of my favourite visualizations
A wide variety of different data visualizations is possible. In this video we explore three more exotic graphical data presentations.
Jeremy shows a word cloud, which is a graphical summary of a corpus of text. The size of a word indicates its relative frequency in the text – the most commonly occuring word should be the largest. Often stop words like ‘the’ or ‘and’ are removed before a word cloud is generated.
Lovisa describes a cloropleth, which indicates quantitative data for different geographical areas – in this case different districts of Edinburgh City region. This is a nicely intuitive visualization, but requires some quite intricate design.
Finally, Jeremy presents a Sankey diagram which indicates the size of population subsets over time as the population splinters into smaller groups. The original Sankey diagram charted Minard’s visualization of Napolean’s military campaign in Russia.
There are online tools or Python libraries available to generate custom diagrams in these formats. Check out sankeymatic.com or wordclouds.com, for instance.
What is your favourite visualization technique? Please share your ideas in the discussion section.
Getting Started with Teaching Data Science in Schools
Getting Started with Teaching Data Science in Schools
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