Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1743546.1743561

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Kode Vicious
Plotting Away

Tips and tricks for visualizing large data sets.

Dear KV,

I’ve been working with some code that generates massive data sets, and while I’m perfectly happy looking at the raw textual output to find patterns, I’m finding that more and more often I have to explain my data to people who are either unwilling to or incapable of understanding the data in a raw format. I’m now being required to generate summaries, reports, and graphs for these people, and, as you can imagine, they are the ones with control over the money in the company, so I also have to be nice to them. I know this isn’t exactly a coding question, but what do you do when you have to take the bits you understand quite well and summarize them for people like this?

if it ain’t text...

art in Development

PHo TogRAPH by nIC MCPHEE

Dear text,
Since I often come across as some sort
of hard-core, low-level, bits-and-bytes
kind of guy, I gather that you’re as-
suming my answer will be to tell man-
agement—and from your description
these people must be management—
to take their fancy graphs and, well, do
something that would give them paper
cuts in hard-to-reach places. Much as I
like to give just that kind of advice, the
fact is, it’s just as important to be able
to transform large data sets from col-
umns and lines of numbers into some-
thing that is a bit more compact and
still as descriptive. For the polite and
well-written version of this type of ad-
vice, please see the classic work by Ed-
ward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quan-
titative Information. Now for the Kode
Vicious Kwik Kourse on Visualization,
please read on.