Lesson02

IS428 Visual Analytics for Business Intelligence

About

Weekly Session

Assignments

Visual Analytics Project

Course Resources

Designing Graphs to Enlighten: Principles, Methods and Best Practices

Lesson 2 Slides or web version

Content

Data Foundation

• Types of data
• Structure within and between records
• Data preprocessing: ETL (Extract, Transform, and Loading)

Human Perception and Information Processing

• What Is Perception?
• Physiology
• Perceptual Processing
• Perception in Visualization
• Metrics

Perceptual and Design Principles for Effective Visual Analytics

• System, Color, Gestalt Laws, Pre-attentive processing
• Representation: The encoding of value and relation
• Visual Perception and Quantitative Communication

Designing Charts to Enlighten

• What we mean by an enlighten graph
• JunkCharts: Understand the limitation of Excel charts
• Principles of Graphic Design
• Semiology of graphics

Useful Charts for Data Discovery

• Data discovery with bar chart
• Data discovery with histogram
• Data discovery with boxplot
• Data discovery with dotplot

Hands-on Session

• Visualising and analysing bivariate data
• Interactive visual analytics with Graph Builder

Daily Readings

Day	Time required	Readings
Day 1	60 mins	Eight Principles of Data Visualization [1] The Dataviz Design Process: 7 Steps for Beginners [2]
Day 2	60 mins	Tapping the Power of Visual Perception [3] Quantitative Literacy Across the Curriculum [4]
Day 3	60 mins	Best Practices for Understanding Quantitative Data [5] Data Visualization: Rules for Encoding Values in Graph [6] Sometimes We Must Raise Our Voices [7]
Day 4	60 mins	Choosing Colors for Data Visualization [8] Line Graphs and Irregular Intervals: An Incompatible Partnership [9] 7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs [10]
Day 5	3 hours	Hands-on exercise: Exploring Tableau Getting Started with Visual Analytics [11] Pareto Chart [12] Do More with Bar Charts in Tableau 10 [13] Boxplot [14] Histogram [15]

References

Robbins, Naomi B. (2005) Creating More Effective Graphs, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey, USA.

Edward R. Tufte (2001) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd Edition), Graphics press, Connecticut, USA. Chapter 4-9

Stephen Few (2004) Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Englighten, Analytical Press, Oakland, USA.

Wong, Dona M. (2010) The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York.

Discussion

Discussion Lesson 02