Thanks for reading my blog. I share thoughts and information about things I am learning in the field of data and technology. I also share experiences from my work and side projects. I hope that my willingness to share my work, inspires you to share yours!
This month’s Storytelling with Data February Challenge is to visualize the variance. Since Valentine’s Day is almost here, I chose to visualize a simple Valentine’s Day data set with a boxplot to show variance over time with age groups and whether or not they had changed their minds about celebrating Valentine’s Day.
You may be able to relate to my personal routine: Every day I check my Twitter feed and am blown away by the Tableau community’s ability to visualize data in the most unique and powerful ways. Many of the vizzes that go viral incorporate the latest in new features—from transparent worksheet backgrounds to the incredible power of dashboard set actions. These new features are not only exciting, but serve as a motivator for me to embrace those Tableau basics such Level of Detail Expressions and calculated fields. Mastering Tableau basics will hopefully help me build a solid foundation so that I can fully understand how to correctly use these new features. For instance, it is a little hard to understand set actions if you have never created a set.
The theme for this month’s Storytelling with Data Challenge is holiday data. While I originally planned to choose a data set with a more festive theme, I happen to read an article about the original meaning of the classic song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”. The song is sung by a soldier during World War II who dreams of coming home for Christmas.
After returning from a month traveling in Northern Italy, I am realizing that I have been sharing a lot of “broken record” advice to friends headed there, so here’s my advice in one quick post just to make it easy:
I was first introduced to Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s book, Storytelling with Data when I was a student in the University of Washington Data Visualization Certificate Program, where I currently serve in the role of a grader. Cole’s book had an instant appeal in offering such a practical approach to data visualization in contrast to the stuffy approach taken by other books on the topic. Storytelling with Data along with Alberto Cairo’s The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication and Edward Tufte’s, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information are my top three must-read books for anyone interested in learning the basics of data visualization.
A while ago now, when I first started venturing into learning more about data visualization, I created this PowerPoint to share about my experience. I am kind of happy to say that I still have these same thoughts and feelings today--there's so much to learn!
When starting out with Tableau, there are some things that trip up newbies--things that many tried and true Tableau users have known for awhile and assume everyone else already knows. Newbies are embarrassed to ask these questions and can't quite find the straight answers easily on a Google search, hence the reference "Asking for a Friend".
Every organization faces the decision about which technology tools to use for the purpose of tracking of everything that needs to get done. Here are the main systems our team at Bethany Christian Assembly uses to keep us all on the same page. All of these tools have great mobile apps which is a must for our very mobile staff.
Our organization, Bethany Christian Assembly, uses the WordPress Porcelain theme for our website design. Our resident web design genius, Jordan Sjodin, volunteers a lot of his time to keep our website in good working order. We keep design changes to a minimum knowing the theme is current. Our primary focus is keeping the content up to date.
In the past 48 hours, I re-read, "Show Your Work!" by Austin Kleon and watched the movie "A Quiet Place". I'm combining my thoughts on each as a type of mashup about the need to share our work:
