Why another dataviz blog?

I asked myself the same question. I’m new to data visualization, a little over a year in. I have spent that year as a consumer, greedily sucking down whatever resources I could come across on the web. And there are a lot of fantastic resources out there (I’ll dedicate a post to the blogs I follow).

I wanted to make a blog for three reasons. First, I have recently started publishing my own Tableau vizzes to Tableau Public. It’s a wonderful way to interact with the community, put yourself out there, and gain new ideas and inspiration from others. But Tableau Public doesn’t allow you to elaborate much on what you built, and there isn’t the opportunity to discuss directly with other users on the site. I was also starting to forget how I had put some of the vizzes together, and I wanted a way to document the process.

The second and closely related reason is that I wanted space to explore the creative as well as the structural processes of putting together visualizations. I’m not sure how this will evolve in the blog across time, but it could end up spreading across the entire business intelligence data mining flowchart from scraping to coding to tidying to design to presentations and persuasion and how the heck to be useful to others within ones organization.

The third reason is the community. I’ve been to a couple of Tableau User Group (TUGs) in NYC and the people I’ve met have been incredible. I have also made a lot of use of the Tableau community forums to find answers and to ask when I don’t know. I also just recently got going on twitter, which is another great way to connect. And, I’ve committed to working on #MakeoverMonday datasets which is also a fun community event since you get to do it together with dozens of other people. (And get reviewed live, if you’re lucky!)

For all of these reasons, I decided to start a blog. So now it’s here. Thank you for visiting, and I hope to see you here again!