Understanding Data - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 345

pastor who is marrying us is my wife's uncle, who added a personal touch to the
ceremony, and the guy in the back is a family friend who took it upon himself to
record as much as possible, even though we hired a photographer. The flowers
and archway came from a local florist about an hour away from the venue, and
the wedding took place during early summer in Los Angeles, California.
That's a lot of information from just one picture, and it works the same with
data. (For some, me included, pictures are data, too.) A single data point can
have a who, what, when, where, and why attached to it, so it's easy for a digit to
become more than a toss in a bucket. Extracting information from a data point
isn't as easy as looking at a photo, though. You can guess what's going on in
the photo, but when you make assumptions about data, such as how accurate
it is or how it relates to its surroundings, you can end up with a skewed view
of what your data actually represents. You need to look at everything around,
find context, and see what your dataset looks like as a whole. When you see the
full picture, it's much easier to make better judgments about individual points.
Imagine that I didn't tell you those things about my wedding photo. How
could you find out more? What if you could see pictures that were taken
before and after?
FIGURE 1-2 Grid of photos