-: Hey everybody, my name is Bill Shander
and I'm very excited to be with you to talk about
data visualization and communications.
I get very excited when I talk about this stuff
as you'll see throughout this course, I think.
I think it's a really important topic.
I would argue, in fact,
that your number one job in life is communications.
So if you have data, you have to communicate it,
really anything you have to communicate.
And so we're gonna work on communicating with data.
Obviously, that's the name of the course.
Now, why am I here?
Well, this is what I do.
I work with data all the time.
I work with clients from a consulting standpoint.
I do design, I do production.
And these days I do a lot of this:
speaking, teaching, all this kind of stuff.
I teach a bunch of classes up on LinkedIn Learning
about data visualization, concept visualization,
information design from all different directions,
and of course, I teach this class.
This is going on year three, I think, for this class.
And it's a lot of fun.
I think you all will enjoy it.
Now, data visualization is a lot of different things, right?
It's any visual expression of data
and it takes many, many different forms.
It's been happening for a couple hundred years at least,
we can talk, really,
you could even go back thousands of years,
believe it or not,
with a little bit of nuance to the definition.
But the way we use data, the way we communicate data
from modern audiences takes all kinds of forms.
And the fact is, humans require visuals
to learn about data, largely,
and we'll talk a lot about that.
So we're gonna cover a lot of ground in this class.
It goes by pretty darn fast.
But we're gonna learn a lot of new things, hopefully,
and eventually we're gonna get to the point
where we are really getting good
at thinking about communications.
Now, what this is not.
This is not a course on data analytics, okay?
However, I'll be teaching a little bit of data analytics
essentially in week zero, the prep week,
I am gonna cover a lot of ground teaching
some basic data analytics,
basic data cleaning techniques, et cetera,
just to help those of you
who have zero experience doing that
to sort of get up to speed
so you can analyze some data and run with it
because you need to take data and communicate it.
So we gotta start with the data in the first place.
So let's get going.