I was having a conversation with my barber the other day and he asked me what I did for a living. Although it’s easy to explain to people that already know me and Tableau, explaining it to a lay person was surprisingly hard to do. What was even harder was trying to explain and define data viz without using Excel and pie charts as an example. I guess that’s because for most people when they think of data Excel comes to mind and the pie is the most well-known of the datavizzes. So this got me thinking, how do you explain DataViz to a lay person.
I was reminded of this excellent comic from XKCD on how to explain the Saturn 5 space rocket using only the most common 10,000 words
So here is the challenge, how would you explain DataViz to someone, who had never come across it before, using only the most common 1000 words.
Follow this link to the UpGoer5 editior which will help, or not. Just to make it tricky, data doesn’t appear on the word list.
tweet me @Matt_Francis email ugleymatt@gmail.com and let me know what you come up with.
