Summary

In this chapter, we have learned about the importance of editorial focus and content reasoning—the ability to recognize the most important and relevant stories in your data and the discipline of taking responsibility to optimize the interpreting experience of your intended audience.

We worked through the mechanics of acquiring, preparing, and familiarizing with your dataset. In particular, we highlighted the importance of our own graphical literacy in the task of conducting visual analysis.

We identified numerous physical characteristics of our data that will help us to discover key stories and help inform the types of data questions we may seek to answer in our designs.

Finally, we worked through a demonstration of using visual analysis to make sense of your data, to find stories yourself and then tell those stories to others. We also saw an example of the contrasting visual design solutions used for exploratory and explanatory visualization.

Now that all our preparatory work has been...