DATA 608 - Knowledge and Visual Analytics

This course is about the creation of high quality data visualizations - diagrams, graphs/plots, maps, tables, and interactive applications - that tell the story or stories hidden in the underlying data. You will learn the skills, techniques, and the art of “Storytelling with Data”. You will gain the knowledge and experience necessary to source data and use the tools available to you as a data practitioner to build high quality data visualizations that tell a story, conveying the information that your audience needs to know and wants to hear. Along the way we will study the theory of graphical perception, the quality features that distinguish excellent visualizations, how to visualize associations, time series, geospatial data, distributions, models and uncertainty, and how to use unsupervised learning techniques like dimension reduction and clustering to find structure in complex datasets. The course culminates with building interactive visualizations and dashboards using Shiny.