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Q. What schooling should I take to learn about visualization and data graphics?

October 22, 2010 to Ask FlowingData • Nathan Yau • Share on Twitter

A few people have asked me this question just this past week. I usually point them to this thread in the forums. Any other suggestions?

Q. How did your love of infographics begin?

October 3, 2010 to Ask FlowingData • Nathan Yau • Share on Twitter

Matthew asks:

You say that you blog for fun and out of love for the subject. What kind of infographics give you the most pleasure? Are there kinds of infographics that you look for but don't see?

How did your love of infographics begin?

Also, the recent documentary on info visualization "Journalism in the age of data" raised the question of how infographics can succeed in being beautiful without helping the reader gain insight into the data. As someone motivated by pleasure in infographics, does this concern you? Do you find yourself taking pleasure in this type of work? Can infographics that fail as knowledge tools succeed as art/design? Or when you speak of relishing infographics, are you referring to the pleasure of insight? To belabor this a bit: do you glean more delight from work that is beautiful or that yields insight?

My interest with data graphics goes all the way back to the fourth grade when I first learned how to make a bar chart in Excel. It was for my science fair project on what surface snails moved on the fastest (it was glass). Nothing fancy, and it was probably all default settings, but for some reason, that was fun to me.
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Why I blog

September 26, 2010 to Ask FlowingData • Nathan Yau • Share on Twitter

I answered a few questions for Amstat News not too long ago, and the questions were centered around why I, as a stat grad student, take the time to write for FlowingData and why others should give blogging a try. The questions were more from a career standpoint, but it really all comes down to this. It's fun.
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