Data Visualization and

Story telling
Skill Enhancement Course (SEC-1)
07/07/2025
Syllabus

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• Fred R Barnard

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Introduction to Visualization
• Storytelling through visualization is the easiest art form in the world.
• There are around 6500 languages spoken in the world, but visual
representation of an information is easily understood by everyone
irrespective of the language spoken by them.
• One of the definition of visualization is “Pictorial format representing
some form of collected data of the world which would help us in
making decisions or navigating in the real world.”
• Another more formal definition is “Transformation of the symbolic into
geometric”:-DeFanti (1989).
• When we look back to understand the history of data visualization, it is
not surprising that maps were the first representations to become
common.
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Introduction to Visualization
(contd…)
• Visualization represents some form of collected data of the world
represented as pictures which would help in
• 1. Decision Making
• 2. Uncovering patterns and Trends
• 3. Presenting arguments or telling a story.

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Why do we have to visualize data?
• As mentioned in the introduction, “A picture is worth a thousand words”
• A research by Dr. Richard Felder (1988) on engineering students suggests
that visuals are powerful drivers for learning and receiving information.
• Romih (2016) says
• 1. 65% of us are visual learners
• 2. We retain
• (a) 80% of what we see compared to
• (b)20% of what we read
• (c) 0% what we hear
• 3. It takes just 13 milliseconds for our brain to process an image.

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Why do we have to visualize data? (contd…)
• As the father of data visualization, Edward Tufte says, “there are two goals
when presenting a data : convey your story and establish credibility ”.
• In the current world, where everything is digitalized, a lot of data gets
captured. Big data presents challenges in comprehending, extracting
actionable insights, and communicating this data effectively to the
stakeholders.
• Big organizations make business decisions by using visualization to make
sense of the huge amounts of data coming from their Internet of
Things(IoT)/ sensor devices.
• IoT can be described as sensors embedded in objects that allows us to
collect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the
internet.

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Consider values (x and y) grouped as four sets as given below.(Anscombe,1973).
What is the relationship between x and y? Are all sets identical or different?

Set-1 Set-2 Set-3 Set-4

x y x y x y x y
10 8.04 10 9.14 10 7.46 10 6.58
8 6.95 8 8.14 8 6.77 8 5.76
13 7.58 13 8.74 13 12.74 13 7.71
9 8.81 9 8.77 9 7.11 9 8.84
11 8.33 11 9.26 11 7.81 11 8.47
14 9.96 14 8.1 14 8.84 14 7.04
6 7.24 6 6.13 6 6.08 6 5.25
4 4.26 4 3.1 4 5.39 4 12.5
12 10.84 12 9.13 12 8.15 12 5.56
7 4.82 7 7.26 7 6.42 7 7.91
5 5.68 5 4.74 5 5.73 5 6.89

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Descriptive statistics
x y
Mean Variance Mean Variance
9 11 7.5 4.125
Correlation : 0.82

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Pre-attentive processing
• Even though all the four datasets descriptive statistics are identical,
they have different distributions when we plot the data. In 1973,
statistician Francis Anscombe constructed this famous example to
demonstrate the importance of graphing the data.
• This example is popularly known as Anscombe's quartet
• In the example stated above, it took a good amount of time for us to
comprehend the data when provided in a tabular form. But when
visualized, it just took a fraction of the time to understand the
underlying pattern in the data. This is called Pre-attentive processing.
• Pre-attentive processing is the process of the human brain which sub
consciously gathers information and filters and processes what is
important.
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To summarize, the reasons to create visualizations
can be (Healy and Moody(2014), Solis (2019)
1. Visualization compresses large volume of data into easy-to-understand visuals.
2. Enables business intelligence.
3. Effective for exploration of the data as well communication of insights from
the data
4. Discovering answers to questions from underlying data
5. Enabling data aid decision making.
6. Understanding data in a context
7. Finding hidden patterns in the data
8. Presenting an argument or telling a story
9. Inspiring with data story
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How do we visualize?
• Gestalt( German word for shape or form) principles is a collection of
visual perception principles that aid us in understanding how human
perception works.
• The Gestalt principles were developed during early 20th centaury by
German psychologist Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kuthe
kurt Koffka.
• These principles help in describing visuals in a manner that hold the
power to draw your attention to the key message you want to convey.
• Gestalt Principle is a human perception principle that describes how
we recognize and simplify complex visual patterns.

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Gestalt principle
1. Principle of figure and ground : This states that when we look at a visual,
our brain distinguish the objects as either they are in the foreground or in
the background.

• In this image the viewer may either observe a vase on a colored background
or two faces on a white background.
• This principle helps to focus on the main elements when you develop charts
and put those elements in the foreground.
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2. Principle of similarity: According to principle of similarity, if we group
objects together, then they appear to be similar. Our brain tends to
think that those grouped objects function similar.

3. Principle of focal point : According to this principle, whatever is

different or distinct will be the focal point that catches the viewer’s
attention.

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• 4. Principle of continuity : Principle of continuity states that the
human brain is more likely to perceive a continuous, smooth path
when they visualize a line or a curve, regardless of their shape or
color. If similar items are placed in a row or in a curve, the human eye
automatically follows the smoothest path to look for the similar
items.

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• 5. Principle of Proximity : According to this principle, closer elements
are more likely to be similar to one another. This plays an important
role while visualizing clusters. This principle is so powerful that it
overrides the similarity factor that might differentiate a group of
things that have same color, shape and size.

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• 6. Principle of Common region: It is very relatable to principle of proximity.
According to the principle of Common region, things that belong to the
same-colored region are perceived as a group. In other words, they add
visual barrier or boundary that can create perception that within the closed
region, things function similar.

• In the top row, proximity causes the middle two circles to appear grouped
together. In the bottom row, adding boundaries changes the perception of
grouping, separating the two middle circles regardless of their proximity.
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• 7. Principle of closure: According to principle of closure, human brain
tends to find a single known pattern whenever it looks at a
complicated , incomplete arrangement of visual elements.

• The first one is, three Pac-man arranged at a distance and the second
multiple cones are placed in a way that looks like a sphere.

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• These principles play an important role while building effective
visualization. When you understand how human brains perceive a
particular image or visual, you can use that information to grab your
audience attention immediately.

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