I’m learning Data Visualisation

Who I am

Hi I’m Chloe from South Korea. I’m working on a platform for crowd-sourced stories of using data, called Data Campfire. Our aim is to make learning data more accessible and less intimidating in the world where everybody says data is critical. My co-founder and I have worked on this project since October 2015, and now we’re participating in an accelerator programme The S Factory in Santiago, Chile.

I’ve decided to jump into the journey of learning about data without background in statistics or programming.

Why I’m learning

People think I am an expert in using data when I introduce my startup, but unfortunately I am not at all — my co-founder either! We started working on our platform since our project during our Masters in Digital Experience Design at Hyper Island. Since then I’ve been researching and designing the platform for stories of using data so that the scary subject data can become accessible to people. I’ve talked to many people about the subject, so that’s how we’ve identified the problem. However, I couldn’t create stories by myself or understand what process is involved. I’ve decided to try learning about data in order to understand the problem better and share my learning journey with others on the platform through projects that I’ll be working on.

I have no skills or background in statistics or programming, but I’m very intrigued to turn data into beautiful and interactive visuals. Also, I believe data visualisation is probably the most accessible way to understand and communicate data to non-data people.

This experiment is inspired by the story from the founder of Nomad List. https://levels.io/i-am-learning-3d/

The 15-week learning plan

I’ll give myself 15 weeks of time (11 Aug till appx 24 Nov 2016) to learn two different software. One requires programming and one doesn’t.

For the first 3 weeks, I’ll start learning data visualisation tool, Tableau that doesn’t require coding, so that I can produce something fast and get familiarise with data visualisation. I am going to create a set of charts that would look like below. This is a project ’50 Years of Crime’ shared on Tableau gallery.

For the following 12 weeks, I’ll jump into hard-core (for me at least) data visualisation that requires coding — which means I need to learn coding. I was fascinated by a data visualisation tool D3 by beautiful and interactive outputs it can produce. I’m going to produce something would look like below. The project is ‘The at risk list’ showing areas that are in danger as the ice melts by the global warming.

What’s next

I’m going to share my ups and downs during my learning, as detailed as possible. Which online sources I used, what worked and what didn’t work and many more. Stay tuned!