Visualization
What is the importance of good visualization tools (graphs, charts, figures)?
- Present knowledge faster than text
- Makes knowledge more memorable and easier to understand
- dentifies new patterns previously hidden
- Allows for disseminating new knowledge
- Assist in determining or communicating cause and effect
- Assists in decision making, which "requires cause and effect thinking" (Tufte)
List characteristics of good visualization tools
- Place data in context for cause and effect
- Make quantitative comparisons between things
- Assess possible errors in the numbers reported
- Identifies outliers or contrary cases
- Chart junk is removed
- Chart must convening knowledge without explanatory text
- Legends and axis are defined
- Titles describe the subject of the chart and the main take-away point
- Time and geographic-sensitive data are presented in multiple ways to prevent aggregation errors
- New patterns or new knowledge can be divined from the visualization tool.
page revision: 0, last edited: 21 May 2007 22:55