Members Only

Analysis as Detective Work (The Process #62)

Think about when you first get a dataset. You open the file, not always sure what to expect, and you go through summary charts and statistics to get a sense of what you’re dealing with.

Maybe you plug the dataset into a tool for a quick overview. Maybe you generate a bunch of quick charts to see what’s there. Maybe you see something odd or interesting, and you poke some more in that area.

In spending time with the dataset, you generate knowledge about the numbers and hopefully you glean something useful. Statistician John Tukey called this exploratory data analysis in his 1977 book of the same name.

To access this issue of The Process, you must be a member. (If you are already a member, log in here.)

The Process is a weekly newsletter on how visualization tools, rules, and guidelines work in practice. I publish every Thursday. Get it in your inbox or read it on FlowingData.

You also gain unlimited access to hundreds of hours worth of step-by-step visualization courses and tutorials, which will help you make sense of data for insight and presentation. Resources include source code and datasets so that you can more easily apply what you learn in your own work.

Your support keeps the rest of FlowingData open and assures the data keeps flowing freely.