Data Visualization: An Essential Tool for Data Storytelling

To understand the value of big data analytics, we must realize that, data doesn’t speak for itself. It is up to the people, often analysts from different fields, to tell the story behind the data.

We’ve seen in the start of COVID-19 pandemic the effort to track data of confirmed cases. This dashboard is made by Johns Hopkins University, and has helped track the cases since the start of pandemic. It has helped scientists to see the curve and spot a potential threat.

Source: COVID-19 Dashboard, Johns Hopkins University

Some of you might come from a finance background, and may be familiar with things like the performance portfolio of the stock market data for a specific industry.

Source: GrapeCity Developer Solutions, Wyn Enterprise

Research centers also try to understand demographic data. Here is an age analysis and prediction model, and we can see that it’s slowly becoming a rectangle, which means people will have longer life spans and lower birthrates in the U.S.

Source: Next America, Pew Research Center

In short, people choose to visualize data when they are trying to answer certain questions, make decisions, predict trends, etc.

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