3 Questions for Creating a Good Chart.

Originally, this talk was the 2nd-half of a presentation I gave in collaboration with Dr. Matthew P. Funaiole to participants in the CSIS Executive Master in International Relations (EMIR) program. The workshop attendees had limited experience with data visualization, so this talk aimed to walk through the visualization process by asking 3 main questions. These questions and the substance of the talk were heavily inspired by & modeled after Lisa Charlotte Rost's blog post, What Questions to Ask When Creating Charts.

This talk has since evolved and been given in different contexts for student groups, such as for the CSIS Journalism Bootcamp participants.

Using a dataset familiar to the audience, I spoke about the importance of titles, design choices, annotations, legends, etc. can all make a difference in how the reader ultimately understands the chart. Starting with a dataset, I walked the participants through creating a chart step-by-step, including some examples of what not to do and some common pitfalls to watch out for.