[1/x] Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks (Data column)

I’m reading this cool book about how to visualize data better, and I’m excited about how the author covers this topic simply and beautifully. It’s just that I’m tired of the various reports and graphs that often accompany discussions of important topics, as they forget important principles that turn visualizations from puzzles and beautiful pictures into useful tools for supporting decision-making. Here I’ll just talk about the first chapter of the Principles of Data Visualization, where the author tells Gestalt the principles about how our information perception system works. (And visualize these principles in pictures.)

• Proximity We perceive objects close to each other as a group.
• Similarity We perceive similar objects. (color, shape, direction) group
• Enclosure Closed objects are perceived as a group
• Closure Our brain ignores data holes and complements the structure in the simplest way.
• Continuity Objects aligned together or continuing each other are perceived as a group. Our view is looking for a pattern to continue the sequence.
• Connection Connected objects are perceived as a group We can use the concept of preattentive processing. (pretentious) When you create visualizations, you understand what the eye is clinging to. So we can highlight the part of the image that we want to draw the attention of the audience.

The author separately mentions the Anscombe's quartet, which shows how different visualizations of distributions that have average, variance, correlation may look, the same graph is given in linear regression. But how easy it is to visualize their differences. This shows that visualizations give us a lot of information because our vision is a great tool for finding patterns.)

Continuation in next post.

#Infographics #Management #Economics #Leadership #Data