Click Like An Analyst: Visionary Data Visualizations

Sean Campbell
Authored bySean Campbell
Isa Gautschi
Authored byIsabel Gautschi

In each Click Like An Analyst post, a Cascade Insights researcher shares a handful of links that center on a single B2B tech sector topic.

Below, Cascade Insights Senior Research Analyst Jacob Dittmer shares a few noteworthy data visualizations from recent tech news.

Trails of Technology series. Backdrop of particle trails, light and science related elements in three dimensional space to complement your design on the subject of modern technology

Show, don’t tell.

This is a mantra for all kinds of storytellers. It was invoked to me by several journalism professors, and I too invoked it as an editor.

Crafting and presenting research are no different. There is an inherent narrative to research that often requires an element of “show, don’t tell.”

Data visualizations can function as rich pieces of content loaded with critical data interrelationships and interplay. Sure, pie charts and bar graphs still constitute the bulk of visualizations, but there are countless ways to present and tell a story with data.

Data visualizations can function as rich pieces of content loaded with critical data interrelationships and interplay. Sure, pie charts and bar graphs still constitute the bulk of visualizations, but there are countless ways to present and tell a story with data.

These links showcase a handful of data visualizations that tell compelling stories in the B2B tech field.

  • In Nominet’s “Mapping the Online World,” earth looks lopsided since the sizes of the countries are based on “the number of registrations within each country’s internet domain.” The main outlier is Tokelau, a small Pacific island nation of 1,400 people. The country is enormous in this atlas, with more than 31 million registered domains. Also, the U.S. is much smaller than we’re used to seeing it due to a majority of sites opting for the ‘.com’ registration instead of the country code.
  • Remember Econ 101? Supply and demand charts can be mind-numbing. Dice, however, did a great job presenting the intersection of technology skills in the job market in a non-boring way. It may come as no surprise that skills like Python and Cloud are “hot,” while waterfall and visual basic are “Cold.”
  • Using a slightly different but easily accessible set of visualization tools, this blog post elaborates on why Python is the best language for data science. By examining data sources like Stack Overflow, Indeed, and Google Trends, this article shows that Python is dominating R and Scala in the data science field.
  • This site presents a plethora of U.S. government data on computer science degrees. With only a few clicks you can be investigating average tuition, the institutions that award the most degrees in the field, and more.
  • If you aren’t a computer science/math wunderkind, then grasping how algorithms work can be a challenge. For me, the video “Visualization of 24 Sorting Algorithms In 2 Minutes,” helped it click into place.
  • And let’s not lose sight of the goal in a good data visualization: telling a story. Graphs and images are pretty to look at, but if they don’t further the story, they shouldn’t be there! This blog post runs down the importance (and pitfalls) of a solid visualization dashboard.

Want even more insight on data visualizations? Check out Cascade Insight CEO Sean Campbell’s recent interview with “Storytelling With Data” author Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. For more curated tech sector news stories, see our Read Like An Analyst newsletter.

Image used courtesy of Adobe Stock.

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