Workshop on Data Viz

This page provides resources designed and developed for the Data Viz workshop.

Workshop outline:

1. Discuss aspects of good storytelling. 

2. Reflect on how one can use visualisation to tell a story about data.

3. In groups, discuss what are the best visualisation methods for a given task

4. Demonstrate how Microreact can be used to tell a story.

5. In a hands-on exercise, apply techniques from Microreact to tell a story. 

6. Provide resources to aid healthcare workers visualise their data.

Introduction

Presentation

Principles of good story telling

• Keep it simple, where possible

• Build up towards complex figures

• Be consistent, but do not be repetitive

Examples: Last chapter of the book “Fundamentals of Data Visualization” by Claus O. Wilke 

Clever trick examples

• sometimes cropping large values is justified

• finding a common scale size and arrangement of all the charts

• using a fading effect at the lower end of the chart

• setting the y-axis maximum

• using irregular axis scales

• when it makes more sense to directly label the bars with their actual values

Group Activity: Real scenario from a public health lab in the USA: Can we identify ways to reduce poor sequencing outcomes?

Demonstration on how Microreact can be used to tell a story

Activity: Using Microreact to tell our own story

Resources: Microreact instructional videos