Data visualization is the art and science of displaying information graphically. Pie charts and bar charts are so ubiqitous these days that it’s easy to take them for granted, but visualizing information in graphical form has been around for only a few hundred years. The process of exploring complex datasets and finding ways to make the data understandable, accessible, and useful for people seems to me to be so valuable in this era of fraught political conversations and misinformation. Visualizations have the ability to inform and engage readers in a way that text alone cannot. My career has consisted of policy research and data analytics, and the intersection of policy research and data visualization is probably the most interesting to me. Communicating research well is hard, and I think effective data visualizations can help.
The value visualizations bring to communication is often illustrated by the data journalism pieces of The Guardian, FiveThirtyEight (RIP), and The Washington Post. The pieces that most inspire me are the ones that create an interactive experience for the user by linking the data to actions like scrolling or clicking buttons. That’s why I wanted to learn Svelte and d3. And here I am documenting that learning journey to hopefully share my path with others interested in making interesting and engaging pieces that will add more than clickbait and SEO-bait to the internet.
Resources
TL;DR: some of the books, websites, and tutorials that were useful to me when learning either Svelte, d3, web development, or data visualization theory.
Tutorials
Websites
- Information is Beautiful
- The Pudding’s Resources page
Blogs
Courses
- Newline’s Better Data Visualizations with Svelte course by Connor Rothschild
Books
- Interactive Data Visualization for the Web, by Scott Murray
- W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte