By @mhawksey

[Presentation] Dabbling with Data Visualisation

Update: Nicola Osborne (EDINA) has kindly live-blogged the session so extensive notes are here

Later today I’ve been invited by the University of Edinburgh Data Library team to talk about data visualisation. The abstract I submitted and slides are below. Putting a slidedeck like this together is always useful as you mentally sort through your mind the pieces of knowledge you’ve obtained, which in my case is only from the last year or so. It’s also a little unnerving to think how much more is still out there (known unknowns and unknown unknowns). The slides contain links to source (when you get to the data/vis matrix some of the thumbnails are live links), here’s also the bundle of top level links.

There are a number of examples throughout history where visualisations have been used to explore or explain problems. Notable examples include Florence Nightingale’s ‘Mortality of the British Army’ and John Snow’s Cholera Map of London. Recently the increased availability of data and software for analyzing and generating various views on this data has made it easier to generate data visualisations. In this presentation Martin Hawksey, advisor at the Jisc Centre for Educational, Technology and Interoperability Standards (Cetis), will demonstrate simple techniques for generating data visualisations: using  tools (including MS Excel and Google Spreadsheets), drawing packages (including Illustrator and Inkscape) and software libraries (including d3.js and timeline.js). As part of this participants will be introduced to basic visual theories and the concepts of exploratory and explanatory analytics. The presentation will also highlight some of the skills required for discovering and reshaping data sources.

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