A short course for students to increase their proficiency in analyzing and interpreting data visualizations. By completing this short course students will be able to explain the importance of data literacy, identify data visualization issues in order to improve their own skills in data story-telling. The intended outcome of this course is to help students become more discerning and critical users of data, graphs, charts and infographics.

The need to understand data visualizations has never been more important. Every day we are inundated with more data, graphs and charts. Some of these data visualizations are well-designed and easy to understand, and others are confusing and misleading.

Data literacy is often framed as a set of skills for data professionals, but we believe data literacy is for everyone. Everyone can benefit from improving their understanding of how data is created and their ability to analyze and interpret data.

In this book, we will introduce the key stages in the data journey, discuss why data visualizations can be so effective at conveying information, and provide an overview of different ways of presenting data and different types of data visualizations.