Research Guides: Data Literacy: Analyzing and Visualization

Analyzing Data

You will then need to analyze and visualize your data. For analysis, this will depend on the subject matter. Your department will have more information about the available and appropriate software for your research. You will need to contact your department for more information regarding the analyzation of your data.

SAGE Secondary Data Analysis
Highlighting both the theory and practice of secondary analysis and the use of secondary sources, this collection considers the nature of secondary analysis as a research tool; reflects on the definitional debates surrounding terms such as secondary analysis, data re-use and restudies; illustrates how secondary analysis is used in social science research; and finally reviews the practical, methodological and ethical aspects of secondary analysis.
Which Stats Test
Answer a handful of multiple-choice questions to see which statistical method is best for your data.

Cleaning Data

While analyzing your data, there are some things to look out for such as:

irrelevant or duplicate observations
typos
outliers
missing or suppressed information

Watching out for these can help your data be analyzed and visualized effectively.

Resources for Cleaning Data

Best Practices in Data Cleaning
This book provides easily-implemented suggestions that are research-based and will motivate change in practice by empirically demonstrating for each topic the benefits of following best practices and the potential consequences of not following these guidelines.
Preparing Data for Visualization
This video explains the steps to prepare data for visualization: cleaning, creating, converting, and consolidating.

Visualizing Data

Next, the data will need to be visualized in a way that is easily understood by readers. Visualizing your data can vary depending on the type of data. Below are some helpful resources regarding visualizations.

Books

Everyday Data Visualization by Desireé Abbott
ISBN: 9781633438408
Publication Date: 2024-05-28
Radically improve the quality of your data visualizations by employing core principles of color, typography, chart types, data storytelling, and more. Everyday Data Visualization is a field guide for design techniques that will improve the charts, reports, and data dashboards you build every day. Everything you learn is tool-agnostic, with universal principles you can apply to any data stack.
Interactive Data Visualization by Matthew O. Ward; Georges G. Grinstein; Daniel Keim
ISBN: 9781568814735
Publication Date: 2010-06-14
Visualization is the process of representing data, information, and knowledge in a visual form to support the tasks of exploration, confirmation, presentation, and understanding. This book is designed as a textbook for students, researchers, analysts, professionals, and designers of visualization techniques, tools, and systems. It covers the full spectrum of the field, including mathematical and analytical aspects, ranging from its foundations to human visual perception; from coded algorithms for different types of data, information and tasks to the design and evaluation of new visualization techniques. Sample programs are provided as starting points for building one's own visualization tools. Numerous data sets have been made available that highlight different application areas and allow readers to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different visualization methods. Exercises, programming projects, and related readings are given for each chapter. The book concludes with an examination of several existing visualization systems and projections on the future of the field.

Articles

Reveal, Don’t Conceal: Transforming Data Visualization to Improve Transparency
This article does a systematic review of various visualization techniques and considers improvement of figures in research.

Webinars

Finding and Using Data and Statistics
This workshop will help you to find and use statistical information about your topic. We’ll discuss the distinction between data and statistics, and we’ll demonstrate how to use library databases such as Opposing Viewpoints and CQ Researcher to retrieve statistics about current, controversial topics.