Surprise Me!
I was a bit puzzled when I read the lines in Robert’s hint to the InfoVis Workshop called “Telling Stories with Data“, saying: “If you haven’t watched the Hans Rosling video yet, you probably haven’t realized that visualization isn’t just there for data analysis, it’s also a great tool for telling stories.”
This is exactly what I mentioned earlier in an older post:
A good visualization should tell us a story about the data you didn’t know before and not the other way round, i.e., once you know the story, you create a visualization around it.
Here is a nice proof of how this usually works:
Antony and Alan talking about some visualization at the 2002 JSM in NYC
If the result of your graphical analysis is not something you can put into a story, you probably didn’t really succeed with your analysis. Of course, we are not equally gifted in telling stories …
