What I learned from Data Journalism Workshop

The Data Journalism Workshop on last Wednesday exceeded all of my expectation. I truly enjoyed it especially the session of Data Visualization presented by Professor Laura Stanton. She is an incredible teacher with openness and great passion. She made the lesson fun and succeeded in holding the attention of all the students. Her creative teaching method got all of us to be involved during her lesson.

I have always been terrible at working with data and tried to stay away from it, but this training showed me the way to maintain interested and how to play with the data. It is not exaggerating to say that it has shifted the way I think about data visualization.

I have learned from the workshop that the same data set can be displayed in more than one way. One of the illustrations Professor Laura Stanton delivered during the workshop is using graphics to represent the quantity of automobiles sold in different parts of the world. We can either use a range-rated symbol such as pie chart in various sized in proportion to the represented data or color shading to map the quantity sold per nation.

Bellows are some examples of proportional symbol maps:

Data visualization with range-rated symbols

Sources : https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog486/node/1869

Data visualization with color shading​​

Sources : http://global.qlik.com/us/blog/posts/patrik-lundblad/visual-encoding

Even though we all feel overwhelmed with six sessions crammed in one day, I am so thankful that I had the chance to attend this amazing workshop. I am looking forwards to much more opportunities in the near future. At the moment, I cannot wait to put all what I have learned into practice. The knowledge I gained will last forever.

#DataVisualization #ProfessorLauraStanton