I love great visualizations.
Graphs that conceptualize. Storytelling galvanizing people to action. Interactive plots for playing “what if?”. Artistic visualizations so beautiful, they evoke emotion at a glance.
Because I love good visualizations, I want to make them and I want to make them great.
Where am I going with this? I’m not sure. I am a data scientist, data analyst and data engineer all rolled into one. I like the data harvesting, mining, mungling and cleaning. Creating pipelines and reliably repeatable processes. Modeling, measuring and analyzing. Writing Python and R. Creating visualizations and stories. As I start my job search, I’ve not yet found a job title for an intersection of it all. Who doesn’t want it all?
I may love great visualizations, but does that mean I should commit myself to only the Art and Science of Viz? Is being a connoisseur good enough?
One thing I learned from being a website designer/developer is that, although I am really jazzed by good website design, I get my biggest kick out of the technical side of making designs come to life.
In the interest of having a strong, long-term relationship with data viz, I’m going to practice making visualizations ‘on the side’ while working my data projects and taking more data classes. I believe effectively telling a good story with data is a worthy skill to have, regardless of on which part of the analyst/scientist/engineer spectrum I land.
Leave a Reply