Shirley Wu chats about her career as a freelancer, what data visualization is, how to get started with learning data visualization, taking data visualization into the real world, and her tech stack.
Shirley Wu is a freelance data visualization expert. Data visualization, at its core, is when you take lots of data, and it's hard for you to look in Excel. You visualize that into some graph or chart, and the most simple could be a bar chart or some graph so that you can understand trends within it easier.
In data visualization, there is an entire spectrum of approaches you can take with a dataset. You have to decide on the balance between art and the data. With clients, choosing where in that spectrum is asking yourself, "What do I want for the end-user to experience?" The difference between a purely artistic piece and a visualization is that with data visualization, there's a goal to it. You're taking data, and you're trying to communicate something, or you're trying to build a tool to help people explore that data.
"How Shirley Wu Built A Career As A Freelance Data Visualizer" Transcript