As companies across all sectors have invested massive amounts of capital in the collection and evaluation of data and analytics over the past decade, clear and coherent data visualization has become increasingly important.
“Graphics raise questions that stimulate research and suggest ideas,” wrote statistician Antony Unwin in a 2020 article for the Harvard Data Science Review. “Graphics reveal data features that statistics and models may miss: unusual distributions, local patterns, clustering’s, gaps, missing values, evidence of rounding or heaping, implicit boundaries, outliers and so on.”
The importance of strong data visualization became tangible to millions during the Covid-19 pandemic, as people around the world sought to understand the mechanisms of infection, assessed case figures and obsessed over curve flattening – or, as one reportedly data-averse former head of state put it, sombrero squashing. Today, data viz fans are numerous enough that dedicated newsletters have been established to report on the topic.
