As visitors know, I’m in the key stages of book writing. I won’t bore you by repeating the background of that anymore.
As you might anticipate, in a book about data visualisation, there is a chapter about data, describing the mechanics for gathering, familiarising with, preparing, analysing etc.
One of the easy assumptions to make is that anybody who is interested about visualisation – and certainly enough to buy a book about it – is going to arrive with at least a basic understanding of data and numerical literacy (inc. some stats knowledge).
That’s not always the case. Plenty of people have little knowledge of data but are keen to learn about – and do – visualisation. Indeed, for some, the ‘little’ knowledge they do have is a shortcoming that can seem hard to overcome. They might not know the difference between quantitative and qualitative or discrete and continuous data, for example. This naturally leads to a certain anxiety and perhaps, in the extreme cases, fear.
Experience from meeting delegates on my training courses and teaching modules down the years reveals as much. It is a generalisation but I would suggest this is more prevalent amongst people who have a dominant background in a creative environment but little experience in more analytical pursuits.
I’m keen to make the contents of my book as accessible as possible to as wide a group of people as possible and this is therefore a key section to cover.
To help fine tune my coverage of this particular topic, I would therefore appreciate the opportunity to hear from people who might identify with having (currently) or having had (in the past) a deficit in their abilities around working with data.
- For those who have had managed to overcome such obstacles, what helped you get through this? What learning techniques, resources or practice approaches would you advise others to seek?
- For those who still have a certain anxiety or lack of confidence around working with data, what do you think would help you? What are the things you really don’t understand?
To be clear, this is not related to any anxiety over how people will use your data, how their lack of chart literacy might lead to misinterpretations, it is simply your confidence in working with data yourself.
If anyone has any insights to share I would really value you adding comments below. This input will really help me check I have something approaching the right content and tone for my book. Thank you in advance.