Data Insights: New Ways to Visualize and Make Sense of Data offers thought-provoking insights into how visualization can foster a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of data. The book offers perspectives from people with different backgrounds, including data scientists, statisticians, painters, and writers. It argues that all data is useless, or misleading, if we do not know what it means.Organized into seven chapters, the book explores some of the ways that data visualization and other emerging approaches can make data meaningful and therefore useful. It also discusses some fundamental ideas and basic questions in the data lifecycle; the process of interactions between people, data, and displays that lead to better questions and more useful answers; and the fundamentals, origins, and purposes of the basic building blocks that are used in data visualization. The reader is introduced to tried and true approaches to understanding users in the context of user interface design, how communications can get distorted, and how data visualization is related to thinking machines. Finally, the book looks at the future of data visualization by assessing its strengths and weaknesses. Case studies from business analytics, healthcare, network monitoring, security, and games, among others, as well as illustrations, thought-provoking quotes, and real-world examples are included.This book will prove useful to computer professionals, technical marketing professionals, content strategists, Web and product designers, and researchers. - Demonstrates, with a variety of case studies, how visualizations can foster a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of data - Answers the question, "How can data visualization help me?" with discussions of how it fits into a wide array of purposes and situations - Makes the case that data visualization is not just about technology; it also involves a deeply human process

Master the art and science of data storytelling—with frameworks and techniques to help you craft compelling stories with data. The ability to effectively communicate with data is no longer a luxury in today’s economy; it is a necessity. Transforming data into visual communication is only one part of the picture. It is equally important to engage your audience with a narrative—to tell a story with the numbers. Effective Data Storytelling will teach you the essential skills necessary to communicate your insights through persuasive and memorable data stories. Narratives are more powerful than raw statistics, more enduring than pretty charts. When done correctly, data stories can influence decisions and drive change. Most other books focus only on data visualization while neglecting the powerful narrative and psychological aspects of telling stories with data. Author Brent Dykes shows you how to take the three central elements of data storytelling—data, narrative, and visuals—and combine them for maximum effectiveness. Taking a comprehensive look at all the elements of data storytelling, this unique book will enable you to: Transform your insights and data visualizations into appealing, impactful data stories Learn the fundamental elements of a data story and key audience drivers Understand the differences between how the brain processes facts and narrative Structure your findings as a data narrative, using a four-step storyboarding process Incorporate the seven essential principles of better visual storytelling into your work Avoid common data storytelling mistakes by learning from historical and modern examples Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative and Visuals is a must-have resource for anyone who communicates regularly with data, including business professionals, analysts, marketers, salespeople, financial managers, and educators.

Experiments, surveys, measurements, and observations all generate data. These data can provide useful insights for solving problems, guiding decisions, and formulating strategy. Progressing from relatively unprocessed data to insight, and doing so efficiently, reliably, and confidently, does not come easily, and yet gaining insights from data is a fundamental skill for science as well as many other fields and often overlooked in most textbooks of statistics and data analysis. This accessible and engaging book provides readers with the knowledge, experience, and confidence to work with data and unlock essential information (insights) from data summaries and visualisations. Based on a proven and successful undergraduate course structure, it charts the journey from initial question, through data preparation, import, cleaning, tidying, checking, double-checking, manipulation, and final visualization. These basic skills are sufficient to gain useful insights from data without the need for any statistics; there is enough to learn about even before delving into that world! The book focuses on gaining insights from data via visualisations and summaries. The journey from raw data to insights is clearly illustrated by means of a comprehensive Workflow Demonstration in the book featuring data collected in a real-life study and applicable to many types of question, study, and data. Along the way, readers discover how to efficiently and intuitively use R, RStudio, and tidyverse software, learning from the detailed descriptions of each step in the instructional journey to progress from the raw data to creating elegant and informative visualisations that reveal answers to the initial questions posed. There are an additional three demonstrations online! Insights from Data with R is suitable for undergraduate students and their instructors in the life and environmental sciences seeking to harness the power of R, RStudio, and tidyverse software to master the valuable and prerequisite skills of working with and gaining insights from data.

This book presents a 6-phase, 12-step process to help those at all levels of an organization use their knowledge, skills, and experience to make data-informed decisions that can help transform their companies-and sometimes, even the world.

Data, technology and insights have forever changed the public relations and corporate communications function. Failure to adapt is more a matter of willingness than inability. Now, technology, data and insights inform more meaningful objectives and elevate performance evaluation. The result is a positive return on PR investment, reduced reputational risk and optimal efficiency. By ignoring these essential assets, PR professionals risk losing executive attention and organizational investment. While "building buzz" or "breaking through the media clutter" may have been adequate measures of success in the past, the top executives who fund and evaluate corporate communications expect much more, including a quantifiable and positive return on PR investment. Leaders assume that corporate communications and PR professionals already understand the fundamentals of business, and they expect an ability to contextualize PR objectives, outputs and outcomes in the language of business. PR Technology, Data and Insights helps communications professionals understand the purpose-built technologies, data assets and actionable insights available to them while sharing best practices to apply these assets for improved PR performance over time, versus objectives and against competitors. Using case studies from industries as varied as financial services, technology, travel, automotive and more, along with best practice examples from Adobe, Mastercard, Southwest, Ford and other world class organizations, PR Technology, Data and Insights shows professional communicators how to optimize technology, lead with data, quantify PR's ability to convert public relations outputs to business outcomes, and deliver insights that empower executive decision-making.

Is your business looking out? The world today is drowning in data. There is a treasure trove of valuable and underutilized insights that can be gleaned from information companies and people leave behind on the internet - our 'digital breadcrumbs' - from job postings, to online news, social media, online ad spend, patent applications and more. As a result, we're at the cusp of a major shift in the way businesses are managed and governed - moving from a focus solely on lagging, internal data, toward analyses that also encompass industry-wide, external data to paint a more complete picture of a brand's opportunities and threats and uncover forward-looking insights, in real time. Tomorrow's most successful brands are already embracing Outside Insight, benefitting from an information advantage while their competition is left behind. Drawing on practical examples of transformative, data-led decisions made by brands like Apple, Facebook, Barack Obama and many more, in Outside Insight, Meltwater CEO Jorn Lyseggen illustrates the future of corporate decision-making and offers a detailed plan for business leaders to implement Outside Insight thinking into their company mindset and processes.

Data Visualization Made Simple is a practical guide to the fundamentals, strategies, and real-world cases for data visualization, an essential skill required in today’s information-rich world. With foundations rooted in statistics, psychology, and computer science, data visualization offers practitioners in almost every field a coherent way to share findings from original research, big data, learning analytics, and more. In nine appealing chapters, the book: examines the role of data graphics in decision-making, sharing information, sparking discussions, and inspiring future research; scrutinizes data graphics, deliberates on the messages they convey, and looks at options for design visualization; and includes cases and interviews to provide a contemporary view of how data graphics are used by professionals across industries Both novices and seasoned designers in education, business, and other areas can use this book’s effective, linear process to develop data visualization literacy and promote exploratory, inquiry-based approaches to visualization problems.

Collect data and build trust. With the rise of data science and machine learning, companies are awash in customer data and powerful new ways to gain insight from that data. But in the absence of regulation and clear guidelines from most federal or state governments, it's difficult for companies to understand what qualifies as reasonable use and then determine how to act in the best interest of their customers. How do they build, not erode, trust? Customer Data and Privacy: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review brings you today's most essential thinking on customer data and privacy to help you understand the tangled interdependencies and complexities of this evolving issue. The lessons in this book will help you develop strategies that allow your company to be a good steward, collecting, using, and storing customer data responsibly. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.

Many analysts are too concerned with tools and techniques for cleansing, modeling, and visualizing datasets and not concerned enough with asking the right questions. In this practical guide, data strategy consultant Max Shron shows you how to put the why before the how, through an often-overlooked set of analytical skills. Thinking with Data helps you learn techniques for turning data into knowledge you can use. You’ll learn a framework for defining your project, including the data you want to collect, and how you intend to approach, organize, and analyze the results. You’ll also learn patterns of reasoning that will help you unveil the real problem that needs to be solved. Learn a framework for scoping data projects Understand how to pin down the details of an idea, receive feedback, and begin prototyping Use the tools of arguments to ask good questions, build projects in stages, and communicate results Explore data-specific patterns of reasoning and learn how to build more useful arguments Delve into causal reasoning and learn how it permeates data work Put everything together, using extended examples to see the method of full problem thinking in action

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!