|
||||||
|
A while back, SEO guru Glenn Crocker and I were talking about how visual analytics can help with search engine optimization. Getting useful SEO information usually requires crunching data for thousands of links, so it’s quite useful to have something that takes us from a quick overview to the interesting details. To illustrate how visual analytics [...] Today’s shrinking resources may tempt us into rushing things along, yet we need to be careful when relying on graphics to make decisions. Good graphics make their point more quickly than a wall of text. On the other hand, poor graphics easily create the wrong impression. Distinguishing between the two is not as easy as [...] How often have we seen a graph in an opinion piece without knowing how it was created, but somewhere in the back of our mind we suspected that it was tweaked somehow to make a point? How can we ferret out “creative analytics” from the true story? Remember Mark Twain’s famous quote about [...] The viz below uses Tableau Public and allows visitors to explore differences in food consumption and food/soda taxes based on obesity rates in the US. Notice the dramatic differences in soft drink consumption among populations with different obesity rates. At first glance, it appears that cutting back on sodas is our best bet for reducing [...] Often we have to work with data without knowing all the details of how it was collected and processed. In those situations we first need to determine what information the data contains and what it can and cannot tell us. We need to ask questions of the data and determine whether it makes sense, [...] Ted Cuzzillo, the author behind the datadoodle blog, got me thinking about data details today. When do they matter and when do they distract from what matters? Being a data analyst means that I love details: the more the better, so I can understand how they form the Big Picture. Intrinsically, I am drawn to graphs [...] When we use analysis tools like Tableau software, it becomes very important to keep our bearings about the data we are investigating. For example, we need to keep in mind that Tableau retrieves and calculates information based only on the data needed to generate the graph. That statement sounds really, duh, obvious. But we can [...] Have you ever had the “pleasure” of slogging through hundreds of feedback forms from a seminar or conference? Have you ever noticed how the mind seems to dwell on the negative comments, maybe even to the point that all the positives seem to loose their luster? That’s when crunching actual survey numbers can help put [...] Last week I wrote about the need to expand our visual vocabulary in line with software that allows us to graph complex data relationships and events in ever more meaningful ways. Let me expand on this point with an example. Just about any introductory statistics course covers the draft lottery of the Vietnam War era as [...] During several conversations recently the following comment came up: “What’s the big deal with visual analytics? It’s just a bunch of pretty pictures!” It took a while, but it finally dawned on me that we have reached the Xerox-GUI-Macintosh stage for data analysis. The early versions of a graphical user interface (GUI) which were developed [...] |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2010 Pharma BI - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
