- Richer data in the workplace
- Better and more accessible tools for storing, transforming, and understanding data
- Workers have matured and developed better technical and analytical skills for understanding data analysis
If you read blogs, there seems to be two broad categories of data visualizers: the first categories are artists and graphic designers who create visualizations as a form of expression, and the second are journalists who use visualizations to tell a story with data. I enjoy and appreciate the creativity that these two groups and their work has been an inspiration to me, but I also feel that these groups get lost in the means of data visualization and often the points they are making are either not important or just not clear.
There are a much larger and less blogged-about world of data visualization that occurs within science and business. In these fields, people need to understand their data and communicate about it. This larger area of data comprehension does not always involve a pretty visualization and at times does not require any visualization at all. In fact, spending too much time creating a visualization would be waste once you have done the work to discover or present your idea clearly.
This blog is about the practice of data comprehension. My goal here is to share with and to learn from practical people who work with data for a living. We are all artists and we all have a story to tell with our data, but we are limited by the constraints of our daily jobs.
-scm
