17  Presenting Effective Visuals

Settling In

Sit with your people outside your project group.

Introduce yourself:

  • Name, preferred pronouns
  • Macalester connections (e.g., majors/minors/concentrations, clubs, teams, events regularly attended)
  • How are you feeling about the semester?
  • How do you like to be listened to, so that you know you are heard and understood?

Data Storytelling Moment

Go to http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/Africa-in-100-years/index.html

  • What is the data story?
  • What is effective?
  • What could be improved?

Presenting a Data Visual

When preparing to present a visualization, consider the following:

. . .

Motivation & Context

  • What is the question you are answering, and why is it important?
  • What data context does the audience need to understand the visual? (W’s?)

. . .

Orientation

  • What aspects of the visual should you explain to provide necessary orientation?
  • Walk through guides (axes, color legend, etc.)

. . .

Highlights

  • Hone in on one or two interesting data points and tell the story behind them.
  • Explain how the visual aspects of the viz reflect that story (this reinforces how they should interpret the viz).

. . .

Big Picture

  • What are the overall trends or takeaways?
  • What are the implications for them? Why does it matter?
  • What comparison are you wanting to highlight?

Improving your Data Visual

Section 4.2.1 Guidelines for good plots presents 6 guidelines for creating great plots:

  1. Aim for high data density.
  2. Use clear, meaningful labels.
  3. Provide useful references.
  4. Highlight interesting aspects of the data.
  5. Consider using small multiples.
  6. Make order meaningful.

. . .

Although it’s not explicitly stated, an overarching theme is to facilitate comparisons.

  • When you present your visualizations, what aspects is the viewer drawn to, and what do they want to compare?
  • Make it as easy as possible to compare those things.

Now You Present

For about 2 minutes: Present your visualizations to your group.

For about 5 minutes: Discuss as a group how you might improve the visualizations and/or refine the data story.

  • Consider the 6 guidelines for creating great plots.
  • What questions do you have as the audience?
  • What addition information might provide important context to understand the comparisons being drawn?

Human-centered data science

Let’s take a moment to explore The Pudding’s 30 Years of American Anxieties.

  • In what ways do these letters reveal essential context that would never be found in a dataset?
  • What hidden context can you imagine for your dataset?
    • What additional information could accompany your dataset to provide a more full picture of the lived experiences of all those who may have been connected to the data?
    • Who collected this data? Why? What might have been their agenda?
    • How might the agendas of the data collectors affected what data are available? In terms of:
      • What cases are present in and absent from the data?
      • What variables are available and in what format (e.g., categories)?
    • Think about the labor involved in collecting your data. Whose labor is most visible and applauded? Whose labor is invisible?

Your project in 3 visuals

Now find your project group and work through this exercise.

Exercise: If your digital deliverable (whether blog post or interactive website – we’ll talk about that next week) could only show 3 visuals, what would they be? Why?

  • What ideas do you have about the order of your visuals?
  • What might you do to combine multiple visuals into one?

Resources for sparking creativity and imagination in your plots

After Class

  • Take a look at the Schedule page to see how to prepare for the next class.
  • Study for Quiz 3, which is on Monday.