As an undergrad at Elon I took a class called Data Visualizations where we focused on the technical skills of mining data and displaying it using various tools, like Tableau and R. However, I always thought the class was missing the point in someway I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
After watching the film “Journalism in the age of data”, I realized what my undergrad class was missing. It was the fact that the whole reason behind making an infographic or a data visualization is to tell a story. The narrative of the visualization should be equally important to the end result as the physical representation of the statistics you are analyzing.
It is extremely important to keep this in mind when creating an info graphic or visualization because when dealing with a large dataset you can easily get lost in all the numbers because of the scale you are working on. The best visualizations find the perfect balance between scripting an intriguing narrative and accurately representing the data while incorporating attractive aesthetics.
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