Course Description: The digital world we live in generates vast amounts of data. This data has the potential to help us understand the world and make better decisions. This course is about representing data using the visual domain. We learn how to turn gigabytes of numbers into pictures and interactive displays. We will use the visual domain not only for communicating insights but also as a means of analysis. We will learn about data structures (how to connect to data), data aggregation (how to summarize data), and principles of design (how humans consume visual content). We will apply these concepts to business and economic data, including sales, financial performance, pricing, etc. The emphasis is on hands-on exercises and creation of new visualizations using data visualization software Tableau. Full syllabus is here.
I teach the course using a series of labs – hands-on exercises that illustrate relevant concepts. For example in lab 1 we ended with a viz that looked like what you see below. It shows how powerful Tableau is: after just one class we are able to pull many insights from the data. Some of the other visualizations include map of grocery chains in NY, dashboard combining stock prices and fundamentals.