On 8 September 2021, Yasmeen Al Jalal, Managing Director of the Shuwaikh Economic Office, gave a guest lecture at Kuwait University’s College of Business, Financial Modelling class entitled "Data Visualisation Fundamentals".
The lecture was given in the framework of the final stage in data analysis whereby understanding the key aspects of visually presenting data.
3 Data Visualisation Fundamentals.
The first step in creating any type of data visualisation, is thoroughly understanding your data. The key point reiterated in the lecture is that you are not presenting data. You are offering conclusions drawn from the data. This is predominantly achieved by revealing trends and patterns. Meanwhile, an often overlooked element of data visualisation is chart selection. More importantly, by choosing the wrong visual, you can allow room for misinterpretation. Finally, another key step in creating a visualisation is formatting (color, font, size, layout, interactivity, etc.). The fundamental point emphasised here is that the key to formatting is consistency and clarity.
Creating a Sankey Diagram using RawGraphs.
Upon grasping the key fundamental steps in creating a data visualisation, the students participated in a practice exercise to create a data visualisation for Alphabet’s 2020 Financial Operations using the Sankey Diagram. In this exercise, the data was cleaned and organised in Excel and the graph was developed and formatted in RawGraphs.
After the lecture, the students selected their own company to create a data visualisation and came up with informative and visually appealing diagrams (see students’ work below).
Special thanks to Dr. Sulaiman Al Bader for this opportunity.
Students’ Work
