68  Explanatory Data visualization

So far, we’re still dealing with exploratory plots. They are nicely formatted for the purposes of this book, but in reality all the plots we’ve seen so far would not typically be visually appealing. That’s OK, since they don’t have to be beautiful to be meaningful. To develop our solution further, for publication, we can imagine the preparation of Figure 68.1.

Figure 68.1: An explanatory figure, in which the trend we want to emphasis is clearly highlighted with a red regression line. The axes tick marks clearly indicate that the data is plotted on log scales.

Like the text of a scientific paper, explanatory data visualizations tell the story of your research, regardless of where they appear. That’s why it’s important to understand the purpose of your plot, i.e. what do you want to say?, as well as the intended audience. Explanatory plots are presented for a specific purpose, so Figure 68.1 will not be appropriate in all situations! It’s just one of many solutions.

Explanatory plots always exist in the context of an audience and media.

Specialist Generalist
Yourself Lay audience
Lab members Scientists outside you field
Table 68.1: The two broad audiences for data visualizations. In most cases, other scientists inside your field will be part of your audience.

Depending on the media, there are different questions we should consider:

For print:

For oral presentations:

For poster presentation:

If you choose to publish on-line, further options beyond data visualizations for print are available:

For composing a scientific article see xx including sections on writing figure legends in xx, for oral presentations and some special use cases for data visualization in that context, see xx.